● National Student Journalist of the Year Runner-Up ●
My Portfolio: Marketing & Audience Engagement
Keeping your audience engaged with your content in the digital age is hard. Getting people to actually read your article when the average teen's attention span is about eight seconds is harder.
Running a newspaper is expensive. Continuing to purchase equipment and print physical copies of the paper in an increasingly paperless era is expensiver (yes, that's the technical term).
Working with Advertisers
Besides the costs of printing, everything The Spoke does is independently funded. If we need new camera equipment, want to submit our work to a contest or need some extra cash to aid a reporter, we have to raise that money ourselves. The Spoke earns its primary source of revenue through deals with advertisers.
At the beginning of every school year, I worked with the Buisness Manager to connect with local businesses to garner as many advertisers as possible. We give them real estate in the print issue as well as on web — really, it's a win-win situation. These were some of the ads business purchased in The Spoke this year.
Rather than paying for this ad with a check, Candelarios supplies the Editorial Board with pizza on our production nights, free of charge.
Selling Subscriptions
Ads give us the best bang for our buck. But we don't stop there. The Spoke also offers a direct-mail subscription. For the low price of $25/year, subscribers receive their very own copy of each print issue at home. Not only does this help bring in some extra money, but it also helps ensure that The Spoke is reaching the widest possible audience.
Over the summer, I worked with The Spoke's Design and Business editors to create a new subscription service form for this year. I then worked with the Webmaster to add a spot on the homepage of The Spoke's website for readers to subscribe, hoping to increase our numbers. This year, The Spoke had roughly 250 subscribers (do the math: that's about $6,000 in pure profit!)
Raima, a junior and one of the Opinion Editors, and I set up a table at Conestoga's 2023 graduation ceremony. We sold copies of the Senior Map for $2 a piece as well as subscriptions to the paper for the following academic year. During graduation alone, we made around $500 in profit.
Distributing in the Community
There's no point in reporting the news if no one is going to read it. The Spoke manages a 1,500-issue distribution, throughout the school and in the community. The school part is easy: we typically hand out hundreds of copies of the paper within the first day or two of an issue's release as students pick up the paper and take it home to read.
Our audience starts at Conestoga's student body, but it does not stop there. We put copies of The Spoke in our local public libraries, YMCA, gyms, cafes, restaurants and other popular hang-out spots. After a week or two, we often get requests from the public libraries to restock — people took all of our print copies!
Members of The Spoke's staff packing envelopes with copies of The Spoke's print issue for the "pony," the inter-district mail service. We send copies of the paper to the elementary and middle schools in the school district to increase our audience engagement.
12 Days of Spoke
The Spoke produces seven print issues a year: in early October, November, December, February, March, April and June. To bridge the gap between our print issues in early December and February, we run a special "12 Days of Spoke" online edition.
The 12 days before school leading up to winter break, we break from our typical print content and create festive, unique and exciting online content, highlighted on both The Spoke's website and social media accounts. We produce news trivia and publish holiday baking recipes while still reporting on community events — though, this month, with a winter-themed twist.
The 12 Days of Spoke provides our readers with a new form of content and a break from the same-old at the end of the year. It also makes our "return" to a traditional print paper in early February that much more exciting.
We receive hundreds of new viewers to spoke.news during 12 Days of Spoke.
