This portfolio is designed to showcase some of our social media work in the 2019 school year from Whitney High Student Media in Rocklin, California. Learn more about our publications program here.
Let's start with Instagram, where we report daily from @detailsyearbook.
Another way we use social media is for updates on ongoing news stories that we report on through our website and print publications. For example, our teachers were going through contract negotiations and almost went on strike. During the conflict between the union and school district, teachers held rallies and did picketing and other activities outside of school time. We used social media to keep our followers connected, especially since teachers weren't supposed to talk about it with students. Even though Twitter is our more "newsy" platform we still showcase the hard news stories on Instagram as they happen. We know that different students relate to different platforms and our goal is to engage everyone somehow.
With Twitter, we post from Whitney Update in a variety of ways, whether it's to drive traffic to our website, report breaking news, showcase performances, tease coverage on other platforms, ask questions or use followers as sources ... and more.
Another way our staff uses Twitter is with short videos, whether it's to show a performance (like choir, band, dance, cheer) or to conduct a quick video interview as another way to showcase student perspectives.
To engage readers and get a feel for which topics or issues matter to our students, we use Twitter to post quickie polls or to link to longer surveys.
Experimentation is a big part of Whitney High Student Media and what we practice as journalists, so that carries into our social media use, too. Not everything we do works, but we always try new ways of using social tools. This year we tried This-or-That Thursdays as a little poll to tie in fun topics, but we didn't get very many votes each week.
From time to time, we use social media to raise awareness about elements of our media program as well, such as purchasing or picking up yearbooks, distribution day for each issue of the newsmagazine, ordering a senior tribute, meeting the senior portrait deadline or getting photographed for yearbook club photos.
One last social media example we want to showcase from 2018-19 is the creation of Wildcat Karaoke, which was a really fun YouTube experiment based on the popular Carpool Karaoke series with celebrities.
We also have Facebook and Snapchat (@whitneyupdate) over time have published stories and content on Pinterest, Tumblr and other social platforms. Because our student body mostly uses Instagram and Twitter, we chose to showcase those two social media areas most heavily in this portfolio. Please feel free to reach out to us with questions or suggestions any time! We maintain our accounts from August 1 to June 1 on a daily basis and check each account only periodically during summer break in order to reflect, check analytics, make changes, train new staff members and set goals for the next school year. Thank you for following!