School News Gets Social

When your students wake up in the morning, they probably check their phones before they even roll out of bed. Catawba Ridge High School’s news team was quick to take advantage of that morning routine. They post daily news updates on Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat so followers know exactly what to expect for the school day ahead. 

Despite school moving online, television production teacher Karin McKemey and her team of 10 dedicated students wanted to keep the news alive. They haven’t missed a single post on social media and their viewership is higher than ever. We spoke with Karin to learn more about their creative approach to news on social media and how her students are delivering news while dealing with school closure. 

When did your news program start?

Our school opened in August without a senior class and only 800 students. We knew it was going to be a building year for everyone's programs. The large majority of our students came from another high school that didn’t have a well established program. I only had a total of 23 kids. About 10 in one class period and 12 in another. It was really barebones. It was mostly freshmen and sophomores. They didn’t have any experience in anything that we were doing. I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to do a TV show with these kids at all, nor was I planning to originally. We were just going to start over kind of like a basic TV-1 class and go through all the basic steps. But, with all the excitement of opening a new school and all the things that were going on, I thought, “We’ve got to document this.” 

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What are your primary channels of communication?

Most of the kids only get their information online. When they get their news, they are getting it from Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, so they are really not sitting and watching a TV show. Instagram [videos] are only a minute, so we’re just going to do one-minute updates every day. I figured it would hit a bunch of skills for the students: doing stand-ups, writing scripts, and figuring out what the most important information that we can get out in a minute. That would buy me some time to start teaching on how to put a story package together. 

We start school at 8:40, so the goal was by 7:15, this would hit all their social media feeds. What is the first thing you do when you open your eyes? You grab your phone. “Hey, good morning. Here is what you need to do for today. Grab your jacket, grab your rain boots, it’s supposed to rain.” Super simple. 

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How did you and your students react when you learned your school would have to move online?

We were determined to find a solution. Initially, I was like “What are we going to do?” Because it’s social media, and the way we had everything set up initially, it really wasn’t that much of a switch. 

I have three kids from my first semester and seven kids from this semester. They were like, “We don’t want to stop doing this, and we feel like our school would miss it.” This is going to be hard, but if you are willing to do it, then let's totally do it. The three students from first semester aren’t even doing it for a grade. They are just doing it because they want to. 

Now, it’s been a lot of one on one lessons when they want to do stuff. I’ll just sit with them and talk them through this particular idea. They are getting some really great training completely by themselves.

I said, “If we make a commitment to do this, then we make a commitment to do this through spring break which is in 3 weeks.” Right before spring break, I said, “Do you guys want to keep going?” and they said, “Absolutely, we want to keep going.”

How has your workflow changed to accommodate the virtual aspect?

We had Google Classroom, and I have a Google Doc that is accessible to everybody in the class. It had every day listed out like a list: everything that would be happening that day, like sporting events or groundhog day. Whoever was anchoring that day knew what they were on the hook for. Then, we would collaborate on our scripts. Everything had to be done and in the folder the day before it actually went out. We just kind of kept that going. Not a whole lot has changed; there are just less people working on it than prior. 

We wanted to make sure we did a story in everything and not just announcements. We do a once a week meeting on Fridays and we map out the next week. Everyone sees when their stuff is due. There is another shared folder, and they plop their stories in there and say, “Hey, it’s up.” 

Blake is the anchor, and he went and shot his stuff today. He texted me and said, “All the stuff is up in the folder,” in the group chat. Hannah, who is doing the segment, said “It's already up in the folder.” He pulls everything down and puts it together and uploads it back to the Drive. Then I push it out on social media in the morning. 

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What kind of stories do you cover now that school isn’t physically in session?

Tomorrow, one of the students is doing a story on writing letters to people. They are doing stories on things that they have heard. One is working how grading is going to work. Another is working on AP testing and how they are going to prevent students from cheating. 

When we did our brainstorming session on Friday, I was like, “What kind of things have you been worried about? What are the rumors you are hearing? What are issues you are running into? Because those are all the same things that other people are running into.”

Our show is aimed for teenagers, so every story that we do, there has to be a young-person spin on it. The cool neighbor that is helping out at a food bank… That’s awesome, but if it's a teenager helping out a food bank, that’s the story I want. 

One that we did a couple of Fridays ago, I absolutely loved. He shot it all on his phone and edited on his phone, which is amazing. What’s it like to live under a roof with all your siblings back again? He is from a family of six. He has been by himself with just his little sister. Then all his other siblings came home. 

Another is how students’ sleep schedules are really off. Our school district is not requiring you to log in at a certain time like some districts are. A lot of students aren’t getting up until noon or 1 pm and then going to bed at 1 am. Their sleep schedules are changing. 

How has maintaining your newscast affected the morale of your school community? 

Our viewership has grown exponentially since we started. We have very dedicated viewers. We have been posting more places too. Normally, it would just be Instagram and Twitter, and we have told all our parents and students to follow us. Now, we are also posting on the neighborhood Facebook Pages and stuff like that. We have had a really nice response with that. A lot of parents of elementary students who would normally not watch our show are getting information. 

We have been trying to put out as much information about the district stuff as we can. People are commenting, and we are getting a lot of positive feedback. We have done some funny stuff. We had a teacher sing-along the Friday before spring break. I hope it is making people happy when they see it.


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