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Establishing a purposeful and valuable School Newspaper by Emma Seaton “Read all about it!� is a phrase which is synonymous with the old traditional-style newspapers; it is the sound of them being sold on street corners, announcing the latest headlines and creating an exciting buzz for the eager readers. Now, with the modern age of technology, where the latest headlines can pop up instantaneously on your screen and where social media spreads news like wildfire, the newspaper industry is already considered by many to be somewhat struggling, especially the more locallyfocused and subject-specific newspapers.
and ears of the school and therefore I could simply oversee the project with just an editorial and perhaps digitally-creative role.
At our school, we have always stressed the importance of children keeping up-to-date with current affairs and, where suitable, reading authentic newspaper articles on different topics; as a result, they learn to identify key features of journalistic writing, they understand how writing can be manipulated to show bias and they are able to explore topics of the past (and present) through the eyes of people who experience them.
We began by selecting pupils to make up the School Newspaper Editorial Team; anyone can submit articles, artwork and pretty much anything else they find interesting to the school newspaper, but these children would be responsible for writing specific pieces on subjects suggested to them by their peers, such as reporting on school and community news, writing film reviews, or helping give child-friendly information on commonly-debated global affairs. As children across our large 4-form entry school began writing pieces, sending submissions and engaging with our new whole-school project, some of the first submissions came in the form of suggestions for a name for the newspaper; from the more traditional titles to more obscure and witty ones, finally The Bannockburn Bugle was chosen by the team members for its alliterative appeal and noble connotations.
In Autumn Term 2018, as part of my school role as Community Leader, I was tasked with creating a new school newspaper, as whilst there had been one at our school many years previously, it was something our Junior Leadership Team had suggested and our Headteacher was committed to fulfilling this idea for them. As someone who once aspired to be a journalist as a teenager, I jumped at the opportunity to coordinate a team of children, who would be the eyes
In our first year of publishing, the school newspaper was an open table for everyone on the team, but on finding myself sometimes spending hours editing font sizes and playing with text boxes to make the pages fuller (I must add I am not familiar with publishing software and so design everything using standard Microsoft Word), by the second year of circulation it was decided that each team member would be solely responsible for one page of the 8-page spread.
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