Web and Social Media
Photo by Tejasvi Ramanathan
If you scroll to the very bottom of my staff profile on thehuronemery.com, my very first story ever published was on Feb. 13, 2020 called “Clague’s music program begins the year with a bang.” I had just joined The Cougar Star as a bright-eyed sixth grader, eager to write for my school newspaper. We did not have our own website, hence the story on The Emery. We printed once and then Covid moved us online. So we adjusted. I would wake up for 7 a.m. Zoom meetings before school to work on the newspaper and yearbook. That year, I helped my adviser build The Cougar Star website remotely so that we didn’t have to publish our work on The Emery. I took that initial exposure to online journalism and just kept running. Of course, the latest stories under my staff profile are over 140 words, contain more than two quotes and have visuals to go with them, but this reminder of my start keeps me grounded.
Web
SNO Distinguished Sites
One thing our publication strives for yearly is getting the full set of SNO Distinguished Sites Badges. Over the years, I've helped out with Best of SNO, Continuous Coverage and Multimedia. Whenever I'm working on a section, I help with contributing content to it, assigning others to complete content regarding the topic and going through our website to find already-published material that we can use.
This year, I contributed podcasts and video to the Multimedia section.
We received the full set of badges in February.
I've also received four Best of SNO awards since I started journalism in sixth grade. Three of these were at the high school level and contributed to The Emery's badges.
In the "Best of Best of SNO: Holiday Edition" email that SNO sites sent out to their customers in December, they highlighted our article for feature stories.
In addition, both my sophomore and junior years, my coverage of the school board counted for the continuous coverage badge. In particular, we used my coverage of the budget cuts during my sophomore year, and my subsequent coverage of healthcare concerns that teachers were facing during my junior year.
We were just named Pacemaker finalists for website this year for the first time, and a lot of that was likely due to the habits we've built up from working towards the SNO Distinguished Sites badge early.
Multimedia Tools
Over time, I've noticed that the thing our website tends to need the most work on has consistently been that we are lacking multimedia elements. We tend to get comfortable with just posting print stories or photostories without trying to expand the ways in which we are presenting our information. This is a cycle that I have been trying to break out of, both for myself as well as within the team.
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Below are a few examples of stories that I've implemented multimedia elements into.
Elizabeth Bang jumps over obstacles in horse riding
I love integrating hot spots to make images interactive. In this story, I wrote a profile on an equestrian at our school. I incorporated hot spots to display the various elements of Bang's riding uniform and their purposes. I used a photo I had taken when I visited Bang's farm and highlighted the important features.
A walk through the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market
I incorporated a few interactive elements in this story. I hand drew a map of the market, created a map and a chart through Flourish and used photos I had taken throughout. Although I did write little stories for each small business, the other elements here really help supplement and give a more complete picture to the reader.
The uptick of students with free hours at Huron
I brought in a variety of storytelling for this piece. My biggest accomplishment for this one was having an audio version of the story as well where I read it aloud. I also made a Flourish chart, put in some pull quotes and included some stats.
I recorded this in the closet for a quiet environment.
Long-form Stories
Another web tool that I like to incorporate in SNO is long-form stories. It helps to visually break text up and provides a more serious tone to pieces that require them.
I especially love the color options for the sections in the long-form style. This is from this story I wrote with Ishaan Kamat.
Podcasting
I have also begun to explore audio journalism. Last year, I started a podcast called "After the Bell Rings," featuring interviews with teachers about their lives beyond school. I love listening to interview-style podcasts, and I felt like our website could use an audio series, so I thought this would be a great option. I've loved hearing stories from teachers that I'd never known much about, and it has definitely been a learning experience for me as someone who is not used to having my interviews recorded.
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Below are two of these episodes.
When I am brainstorming questions for these podcasts, I always try to craft them to be open-ended enough to allow for the interviewee to feel like they can go in whatever direction they'd like while also being specific enough to actually get into interesting details.
Social Media
School Board Coverage
Social Media was a huge way that we covered the budget crisis in 2024. My main reasoning behind this was that the best way to connect with a majority of the student body is through social media – kids are way more likely to open up Instagram than they are to intentionally go to our website. This issue was something that affected the community so deeply that it was imperative that our reporting extended to the public in the way that it would be best received and heard.
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This was a really powerful form of storytelling for me. I saw the importance of branching out and using social media as a tool. It was extremely impactful to see so much of our student body reposting my photos and connecting with our community through work that I had done.
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Click the arrows to scroll through some of the posts I made during the time.
Snow days
Breaking news snow day coverage is another key factor of our Instagram coverage. My sophomore and junior year, I was the point person for this – when my mom would wake me up at 5 a.m. letting me know that there was a snow day, that was my sign to begin texting my adviser, pull out my computer, and quickly create a post and publish it on Instagram before falling right back asleep to start the snow day off strong.
This year, one of our freshmen, Annabella Mi, has been writing up most of the snow day captions, but I've still been working with her to edit the piece and mentor her through the process. I also usually create the post and put it up on Instagram.
These are some examples of the types of posts I've made for snow days. Sometimes, they are more detailed, but usually the goal is just to get them published as quickly as possible to inform families. I do try to incorporate some type of variety between them.
2023-2024
2024-2025
2025-2026
This year, I've been focused on editing Annabella's captions for snow day coverage. This training is important to ensure that we keep covering these things in future years.
For this post, for example, I suggested an alternate lede with the the school closure coming first in the caption to start with the biggest piece of information.
This is how the final post turned out. I formatted the post in Canva using our social media EICs' style guides and posted it once Annabella's caption was ready.
Presidential Campaign Rally
Last year, the week before the election, there were suddenly rumors circulating on a Sunday that Kamala Harris was coming to town for a rally the next day. My adviser heard that another high school adviser in town got press passes for a group of her students, and through them, we were able to secure one press pass for the rally the following day. ​I posted my photos on Instagram in addition to what we posted on the website and placed in our print edition. ​More information about my experience is in the Photojournalism section.
Library's two to a table policy becomes routine
I've really been wanting to bring more news-style coverage into our social media, so one of the major ways that I tried to begin bringing that in was through this post. I formatted it styled after many national news organizations, where some slides have photos with writing and others have just quotes, and I had a lot of fun playing around with the different options. I'm excited to bring this style of quick reporting into our social media more in the future.
Arbor Cookie review
This was a review that I filmed with one of the social media EICs, Salem Dinh. A couple of Huron students had started a cookie business that was extremely popular when it initially launched, so we thought this would be a fun format while also reaching a larger audience through social media.
Chinmaya Mission
In addition to the social media coverage that I do for The Emery, I am also the social media manager for my Sunday School/community organization, Chinmaya Mission Ann Arbor. In August 2024, after feeling like we needed a social media presence for a while, I decided to start an Instagram and a Facebook page.
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My goal with this was to establish an online community presence, and I feel that I've been successful with that. The majority of our group follows us in some form on social media now, and it's always fun to come up with content for kids to do in larger groups.
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I create and post content weekly. It's a combination of flyers, fun reels to promote various programs and posts recapping our events.
Click on the images to view the social media pages.
Last year, the Global Head of our organization was coming for a week-long program, so I created a series of reels and posts for promotion leading up to the event. Most of these were reels that I came up with, many based on trends, that I had various groups of high schoolers participate in. I had a couple of Google Docs and spreadsheets with a schedule to keep myself on track.
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I also did a final countdown in the seven days leading up to the program where I posted daily.
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These are some of my favorite reels from that specific event.
I even got the assistant of our Global Head to participate in this one!
I also posted a series of stories that I saved to our highlights with a daily schedule and helpful information. Tap on the slide to see the full set.
We ended up having more than 800 people that came. Many of them said that they were really encouraged to join us because of the promotional content they saw on social media.
We also performed really well on Instagram that month, with our most popular video reaching more than 20K views.
I am still posting regularly, and this year is the 75th anniversary of our organization as well as the 50th anniversary of our Sunday School in America, so I am already planning for the content I'm going to post starting in a few months.