Marketing & Audience Engagement
Distribution, Engagement & Ads
Distribution Manager
Weekend Distribution
This year I took on a position of being in charge of distributing our publication to businesses and places around town. Due to a lack of sign up, I decided to go through and clean up the google doc for easy access. I then plan to encourage groups to go out and distribute to all the places in the highlighted area in exchange for some type of award. This way, we can get our publication into the hands of our community and create team bonding time between staff members.
Advertisements
For West Side Story print, all of our ads are sorted into the six publications. For design, the designer assigned to ads will create the ad pages, inserting ads from businesses and creating ads for those who request we do so. This can set us apart from others as we can offer both options to satisfy the advertiser. We also make sure to distribute copies of West Side Story to our advertisers during weekends.
Engagement
West Side Story promotes our work during distribution day through a variety of methods. We often use social media as a way to promote our newest issue, but I decided to engage our high school community a bit more. I introduced the idea to draw chalk in the front of our building, with permission, to promote WSS. We also hand out our publication to students coming into school at all entrances, greeting and thanking the students. One of my favorite times in class is when we will share our favorite stories from the morning about an excited student or gleeful teacher.
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We also often include engaging ways to tie in our student audience to our newspaper. For example, we made a version of New York Times Connections as the back cover of our second issue. We have included videos on both feature and entertainment pieces. A quiz included a link to recipes for all of the end options. We work to engage our audience to produce content that is not monotonous.
