Introduction
My experience with marketing has been through selling and keeping track of newspaper subscriptions, creating advertisement flyers, social media posts, and promotional content through interning with my school district. Especially with having a smaller publication of 20 students or less, focus on marketing in innovative ways has been essential to growing our viewership.
Content
For this story about first graders at Rosehill Elementary School receiving 3D printed backpack tags from engineering students at Shawnee Mission South (SMS) high schoolers I attended an event where they were passing them out. I took notes on what the first graders reactions where, what high school students said, what back pack tags looked like, and more. I interviewed the SMS engineering teacher and Rosehill first grade teachers. I took pictures of high schoolers passing out the backpack tags, and attaching them to Lego and Hello Kitty backpacks. This is an example of the smaller district events I attend and cover. My supervisor requested a traditionally written news feature with photos.
After attending the JEA 2025 Fall Convention in Nashville, Tenn., at which the Shawnee Mission high school journalism programs won a large amounts of awards, both individual, and by publications. Each high school also earned pacemakers. My supervisor heard about this through an email sent to the district by my adviser with a list of awards and comments about how huge this is. She wanted me to write a piece from my perspective, not only attending this convention and receiving awards, but also growing up in the program. She also wanted me to interview students and advisers from each school about the historical success of Shawnee Mission. I had over four hours of interviews for this, where I’d learned about the intricate connections each adviser had with each other. Every adviser was from the district and had been taught by or worked with another adviser, except for one, which ended up marring one. Rarely have I done digging into the history of something like these journalism programs. This also brings more attention and recognition to the journalism programs and their routine success in Shawnee Mission, also adding a personal perspective.
My role in generating promotional social media content for the school district consists primarily of updates, marking celebrations, or previewing specific events. The SMSD communications team has a shared OneDrive and Canva account with our designs and logos. The biggest benefits of having these shared accounts is getting to browse archives and draw inspiration, and also having shared access between my supervisors for receiving edits.
My role in generating promotional social media content for the school district consists primarily of updates, marking celebrations, or previewing specific events. The SMSD communications team has a shared OneDrive and Canva account with our designs and logos. The biggest benefits of having these shared accounts is getting to browse archives and draw inspiration, and also having shared access between my supervisors for receiving edits.
Teasing stories from the issue not only helps readers catch a glimpse of what that issue will look like in terms of photo, design, and content. It guides the readers' experience, so they know where to look and what they're looking for. Posting regularly also keeps readers engaged with our content. This follows a design template of story teasers.
To tease stories and get students invested in the upcoming issues our staff has posted pictures of us opening issues, holding them up, or in this case, packing them into envelopes. Even with a short caption exclaiming that the issue is coming out soon makes it more likely for students to open issues and read them once we distribute.
Our third issue of this year was thematic, so we really pushed advertisements online. This was also the first glossy issue the Northwest Passage had ever produced. The theme related to how students at Northwest may feel targeted in specific settings, because of race, heritage, political beliefs, ideas, and more. One of our most controversial stories had to do with the senior GroupMe groupchat. Students were being bullied, primarily by select senior boys. After posting this photo illustration with screenshots of comments and names from the groupchat I heard students talking about it at lunch, in class, and the hallways.
For the first time this year, my Co-Editor-in-Chief and I decided to make selling subscriptions mandatory. By early September, every staffer must have sold five subscriptions. This is to expand our readership, but also make more money so that we can afford printing longer issues, and glossy issues. My Co-Editor-in-Chief and I also went to school in late summer so that we could sell subscriptions to parents coming in with their freshman during Macbook check ins. We send our paper to high schools across the country, who now send theirs back. This has been a great way to cultivate connections with other papers, keep ourselves updated on the evolving world and style of high school journalism, and generate inspiration. We also send issues to local news outlets, who we will collaborate with on coverage. As of January 2026, we have more than 100 paid subscribers and sent the newspaper to roughly 170 schools, parents, news outlets, and more. We hope to expand that next year as well.
Our adviser created an application, and throughout the process got feedback from me and my fellow editors on what kinds of questions should be asked, requirements, phrasing, and more. Besides pasting posters around the school with QR codes so that they can apply, we send out messages to English, Creative Writing, and Graphic Design teachers, asking if they recommend any students join newspaper. Our adviser also has access to Xello results, an aptitude test students are required to complete, indicating what kinds of classes they should take, based off of career interests. If anyone was reportedly interested in journalism we sent out letters encouraging them to join, with application links, and additional information on each publication. This kind of outreach generated more interest because it felt more personal, especially if students like me were handing them out in person during seminar class, and because each slip addresses them by name.
Analytics from our online newspaper website give us crucial insight into what kinds of stories get the most engagement, how long our readers are spending reading each story, and more. Seeing sports briefs get a lot of views prompted us to post score updates and ad new features displaying that in the top left corner of our homepage. Breaking news, once posted to our Instagram and Arts and Entertainment also attract the most attention. That has let us know that striking visuals and interactive or video content generates the most clicks. That is also why we’re pushing for more multimedia content this year. This feature on SNO can also show how many views we’re receiving with correlation to the amount of content being published. The more stories and updates we publish regularly our site has consistent foot traffic. As someone who publishes on website and has taken the time to try and understand and redesign certain features, studying analytics has played a huge role in that.