A lot of students do not know about the North Polk Newspaper and the team that works to put it together. The views for the newspaper are growing as time continues, but the team behind the paper will soon shrink as I graduate. 

Many people know The Orbit is made by Olivia Moody and myself under the supervision of Jessica Trier. There are many things to do to be able to keep the newspaper running smoothly. The newspaper is a newer addition to the journalism department of North Polk so as time goes on we are still working on learning new things about The Orbit. 

In newspaper class, the writers write an article every week to keep up with what is going on in our high school, which could also be a perspective piece. Alongside the weekly article we write, we also have a weekly poll and weekly people in the halls. We tend to alternate who does the poll and people in the halls every week. Once a month newspaper students also have a feature article. A feature article is a longer article that is more in depth about something that impacts the school, it could be written like a normal article, an editorial, or a perspective piece. 

Since Moody and I are the only two newspaper editors we tend to look over each other’s articles to check for errors before we post.

Moody and I enjoy writing articles because we both originally enjoyed writing essays in class. Creative writing would also be fun class to take as a way to get intrigued in writing. 

Personally, I took the newspaper class to expand my writing skills and my people skills. In newspaper, you have to interview people a lot and talk to others to be able to get the information you need to complete the article. I enjoy writing a lot, but not the typical MLA format writing after reading a book. I enjoy the research behind writing. When writing an article you can write it in a way that is formative rather than argumentative and proving a thesis. 

When choosing article topics, Trier gives a lot of room to choose topics that you are comfortable with, but there will always be topics that will push a person’s comfort zone. When writing an article you do not know a lot about it gives you more things to think about. You have to figure out who to contact to get the right information you need and then figure out what is relevant to the story at the time. 

Overall, newspaper class is a fun way to expand your knowledge of writing. It is a different format than the essays you write in class and if you are interested in writing, it would be a fun thing to try out. There are prerequisites that include intro to journalism and then journalism productions before you can become a newspaper editor for The Orbit, but in those classes it prepares you for what is to come when creating the newspaper.