People read the newspaper because their friends are in it. As a newspaper staff member with the goal to increase audience engagement, I should either have lots of friends or put a lot of people in the paper.
The former is not doable for an introvert like me, and I spend the whole year exploring the latter- through public polling with fancy graphics. Even if it’s not directly interviewing, students’ votes on certain topics will be included in the newspaper. I believe the ultimate goal of the paper is to benefit the community, and therefore I try to pick the stories that align with the community’s interest instead of my own. So, for this issue, I decided to collect responses from the students thanking seniors who benefited their lives.
However, it has been more difficult to get people to fill out my Google Form than I expected. Throughout this process, there is a sociological lesson to be learned. Here is a brief list of tactics that I used in the first week of sending it out to get people to fill out my “thank you senior” Google form:
Send to friends
I don’t have many friends but the ones I have are good friends- even if they didn’t fill out the form, they helped me send it to someone else.
Some of them sent it to group chats, or to another one of their friends. However, their other friends often wouldn’t send it somewhere else. So, the form wouldn’t spread very far.
This tactic requires you to have awesome friends who are fervent to help you out or popular friends who talk to over 10 people every day (luckily I have both). In total, I got back 11 responses.
I have less than 60 followers on Instagram so, my personal account didn’t work. Alternatively, putting it on pch_publication did work…a little- I got back 2 responses from posting a 24-hour Instagram story.
Randomly Emailing People
One of my friends emailed my form to dozens of people and sent a screenshot of it to me. I had my eureka moment- why don’t I start randomly emailing people? So, I pulled out my school GroupMe chats and emailed every person. Then, I went through my Google Classroom and emailed those people as well.
I get about around two responses per email sent to 20 people.
ANAGNORISIS!
By the time I got my 27th response, I realized something was wrong- too many seniors were being thanked over and over again. It occurred to me that I didn’t have enough seniors to fill a full page.
My objective, which remained unchanged, was to include as many people as possible. And I realized however many people I emailed, I still stayed in my social circle, since I picked their names from Google Classroom and GroupMe. Therefore, I realized that to achieve my goal, I needed to reach beyond my social circle.
This is not just for this issue of the newspaper, it’s a lesson for all of my newspaper stories. I don’t want to only write stories that only interest a certain group of people, my group of people.
More Randomly Emailing
To fix my hamartia of not being inclusive enough, I picked up Ms. Stricker’s student binder, which includes all students, and emailed 100 students that I had never heard of. Finally, I started getting new names. The combination of my friends’ undying effort to spread the form and Ms. Stricker’s binder, I finally got enough seniors to fill up the thank you wall.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, it takes effort to actually include everyone. My high school experience is rather sheltered- I just don’t know that many people. I can pull off every issue of the newspaper by writing about the things I know but, I think to be a better newspaper staff member, I need to have the courage to email a random name.
Each day opening the form and seeing no responses was bothersome- but every time a new response came in, the joy was unmatched.
As I was formatting the thank you messages into my infographic, I genuinely started crying- because they’re the sweetest passages. Although I don’t know these seniors personally, I think anyone would’ve cried if someone told them, “I will never forget you,” “Thank you for everything,” “You make me wanna show up to practice,” or even “thanks for driving me home.”
At least I would.
