Marketing and Audience Engagement
Zacks shows Boys' Hockey goalie Fuzz Aafedt the print copy of the hockey team's home opener recap in The Spectrum's latest issue.
Marketing: Editing the Promotional Video
Last spring, we had a very small editorial staff of six, so we knew we had to create a strong promotional video to solicit enough editor applications. As a team, we came up with a series of clips that would show the fun side of a newsroom. For editing, this was mainly to engage the audience, so I kept it pretty light and fast. This was a good reflection for me to think about what the audience wanted to see in a promotional video, as well as the more creative side of journalism.
The Spectrum's Spring 2024 Editor Recruitment Video.
Audience Engagement: Rearranging Drop Date
The front page of The Spectrum's October 30, 2024 issue was dedicated to the boys' soccer team making it to the state semifinals at the U.S. Bank Stadium
Last October, when I covered the soccer team going to the state tournament, I quickly realized we would run into an issue: our paper was scheduled to drop the day after the state semifinal game. This was an issue, as if they won, that coverage would be missing from the paper and we would lose our audience, and if they lost, the entire front page would be redundant and we would lose our audience. Moving the article off the front page wasn’t an option, as it belonged there since we hadn’t had a Blake game in the U.S. Bank Stadium in five years. I realized another solution that would engage the audience for both the soccer game and the newspaper: We export a day earlier so the paper comes a day early. Since it was coming a day early, we were able to deliver it around the school so that when students walked in on gameday, the first thing they saw was an entire front page of the paper dedicated to the team.
Audience Engagement: Election Coverage
Another example of audience engagement was emphasizing coverage of the election at all levels. I pushed to run a news article about the presidential election, wrote a front-page article on the Senate elections a month earlier as a “teaser," designed a full page on talking about politics and the House elections, and a staff editorial about issues that editors cared about. Doing all of these ensured that our audience was deeply engaged in the election to an engagement level only seen every four years.
The Spectrum's 2024 Presidential Election Coverage was featured in The Nutgraf, a daily email dedicated to student journalism at the high school and college levels.