Entrepreneurship
A successful journalistic publication requires more than good writing. It incorporates the design, launch, and expansion of a brand. At The Hoofbeat, we have taken significant steps to market our brand to our readers. Our audience goes beyond the walls of Millard North High School. As students take the paper home, as teachers share stories with their colleges, and as district members grab copies to catch up on school news, our publication expands into our community. The challenge then becomes creating a collection of stories that everyone in our community finds intriguing. Through proper marketing, audience involvement, and steadfast entrepreneurship, the impact of our publication has been boundless.
Redesigning & Branding
Last summer, Christina (Co-Editor-in-Chief) and I undertook the initiative to vitalize the print publication of The Hoofbeat. Our goal was to modernize the look of the paper, while creating a brand that we could carry throughout all our platforms. We experimented for countless hours before settling on the look shown below. This new brand allows us to maintain the white-on-dark bolded text of The Hoofbeat that has been tradition for years while also adding contemporary elements to the design. (Read more about our redesign in design.)
Distribution Strategy
At the beginning of 2017, The Hoofbeat Opinions Page Editor Tyler Collins spearheaded a brilliant initiative to organize and order news racks for the school newspaper. After he pinpointed 14 locations around the building for the racks, we created a graphic that matches the new modernized branding of the paper. Tyler, Christina, and I spent near an hour perfecting the design of the graphic—the color, the size, the margins--for the top of the racks. We also brainstormed new distribution strategies. Previously, we delivered about 15 papers to each classroom during homeroom. Now we have decided to place a large stack of papers on each rack on the morning of distribution day, while also continuing to individually deliver 5 papers to each classroom. This way, we are able to centralize the news racks in our distribution strategy while also getting students' attention in class. So far, this initiative has been immensely successful.
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Social Media Marketing
Social media and online networking are quickly becoming the primary method of communication with young adults. It is vital for a journalistic publication to stay active on social media to ensure timely news release and audience engagement. This is why we have pushed The Hoofbeat to be more active on social media. By creating a new position for an Online Editor and sending out updates unique to Twitter, we have nearly doubled our follower base since the start of the school year. We have also integrated our Twitter updates with online stories (read more in web) so our audience has easy access to our news.
Every time we release a new issue in print, we send out multiple tweets to remind our audience to stay on the lookout. We often mention interesting stories in the tweet to capture viewers' attention.
When we release new stories, we tweet them out strategically. If a story is written for an upcoming event in the print publication, we wait until the day of the event to tweet the story. This is our way to keep the news timely and relevant.
Aside from stories, we also tweet out relevant news update within the 140 characters limit provided by Twitter. The tweet on the bottom left reminds students to register for voting, demonstrating our support for the democratic process. The tweet on the bottom right is an update from an impromptu fundraiser that took place at our school. Since we did not have time to write a full story before it ended, I went to take photos of the fundraiser so I could report the news through our social media.
Our social media accounts allow us to stay engaged with the community. We use our Twitter account to share information (via retweets) about other groups in our school.
We also use our Twitter account to share information about important news events that take place in our city. This is our way to stay involved with audiences that extend beyond the walls of our school.
Our audience engagement has proven to be successful through the positive feedback that we receive on social media. Other accounts have tweeted gratitude and advertisement for The Hoofbeat after seeing articles written about them in the paper. This type of community engagement is what attracts readers from every aspect of our community to our publication.
Finally, our community engagement is bidirectional. After a rally broke out at our school, I tweeted photos and information through our twitter account about the event. This attracted attention from our city's most popular news station, KETV. They used our photos in their official story as well as their social media account, crediting us in the process.