Anyway, Back to the Newspaper

There are so many things going on in high schools. It's kind overwhelming. Especially when you're on the school newspaper trying to figure out what's important, what's relevant, what's entertaining. But fortunately, in newspaper, we have categories for articles to help sort it out. These are the ones we use in the Oak Leaf:

     News: The front page. The News section is made up of the lead stories the newest stories, the stories that have the biggest impact. Most major changes in the high school will be reported on the news page. We also usually have a collection of news briefs that cover the national headlines. But not everything on news is earth shattering. Sometimes we put featurey things there like personality profiles of new principles and stories about club events.

     Features: The line between news and features is blurry and hard to find. The general rule is that feature articles are longer and more soulful. They generally include more quotes and show a lot more personality than news articles. It's the most random section of the paper, with everything from clubs to personality profiles to graphs showing the results of national polls.

     Sports: Sports is fairly self-explanatory. We try to cover all of the school-sponsored sports and a few of the non-school sponsored ones as well. The important thing about sports stories is to try to capture the energy and fun of the sports, because sometimes sports tend to become lists of stats, and sometimes reading stats tends to be a little boring. 

     Arts & Ent: This is the section of the paper where the reviews live. Movie reviews, book reviews, restaurant reviews, and pretty much everything else you can review appear here. Also this is where fun stuff like comics and madlibs. I'd also like to see more full articles on this page, like features on students in bands and in art classes and stuff. 

     Opinions/Editorials: This is the section where we the student journalists get to say what we want. It's a fair tradeoff. In return for letting everyone else know what's going on and putting in the hours doing research and layout, in this section we get to say what we think about whatever's going on. It's the only section where there is an "I".

      Most subjects are fair game, everything from politics to personal anecdotes can appear in the Op/Ed section. Of course, the more controversial the subject, the more carefully you have to tread. All the press laws and journalism ethics still apply. Op/Eds are the most likely to be censored.

      Fashion?? I was thinking that in the coming year, we might want to add a fashion section.I know Boyd would like to do it, and I really want to use more color and more pictures, so Fashion would be a good place to do that. Obviously fashion would be about clothes, trends, and stores.