Advisers and Editors Center

Is a School Newspaper Still Relevant in a Digital Age?

JOURNALISM AND A SCHOOL NEWSPAPER ARE STILL IMPORTANT

With technology seemingly changing on a daily basis and the vast majority of it centered around the ability of humans to communicate more quickly and effectively, the slow, plodding school newspaper club seems to be an irrelevant and largely unneeded entity.

But the facts belie this assumption. Here at MakeMyNewspaper, we have seen a huge jump in schools producing, for the first time, their own newspapers. Correspondingly, school newspaper clubs have also been forming, getting more kids involved in this supposedly archaic form of communication. Why?

There are many reasons, but probably the most profound is this one: a printed newspaper provides a profound sense of accomplishment and ownership that electronic methods cannot ever give.

A student who has their personal story told in a printed newspaper is more apt to keep a copy than if it is merely posted on the school website or in some electronic version that lacks tangibility and thus lacks ownership. There is just a different look to a kid seeing something she wrote in print than seeing it on a computer screen.

Print will never die out, as we’ve learned here at MakeMyNewspaper, but there is even more to it than that. A newspaper club that utilizes physical, print newspapers has several advantages over the same digital copies:

  • Physical copies that students can keep and take home.
  • Less competition for attention. A physical copy doesn’t compete with everything else on a website or content site. It is just a newspaper.
  • Sense of ownership and pride. A physical newspaper is tangible, something that can be held in your hand, thus providing a greater sense of personal ownership and pride in the work and the words on the newspaper.
  • Will be read more than digital versions. The truth of this lies in its ability to capture the eye. Try sending an email about your school’s online, digital newspaper and you are just hoping it will be seen among the hundreds of other emails clamoring for the recipient’s attention in their inbox. But send a physical copy of a newspaper home with your students, and parents who see it lying on the couch, on the kitchen table, or where ever will be much more inclined to pause and read through it. This is just human nature and why the value of print will never die.

In short, a school newspaper is still relevant and we anticipate that it will be relevant for a long time to come.

But where does technology fit with a school newspaper? As schools all over the nation realize the value of a school newspaper, we have found that technology has developed to aid in the creation process. From Cloud designers to the ability to print smaller runs at less expensive prices, technology hasn’t left newspapers behind, it has simply enhanced it. Once, only the larger schools or schools with larger budgets could print newspapers, but with current technology in printing and design software, nearly any school on nearly any budget can print.

We think this is good for our schools and our students.

Free Cloud Designer Templates

Our templates are 100% customizable, super user-friendly, and designed specifically to help you create outstanding school newspapers with our free Cloud Designer. Below are a few of the 100s of templates available to you.