Happy Holidays From the Five Star
The newspaper staff has worked hard this year, putting out three editions for the first 4 months of School. We’ve covered all the momentous events from this year, including Fall Fest, Homecoming, Fall sports, and other pop-up events like Trunk or Treat, the Sunfair parade, and the October Overture for musical performances. This year, we lead with a class of 30 writers and editors who are working hard to write and revise these editions for the whole School to enjoy. Each of us represents a different group of students involved in sports and other extracurricular activities across the School, reflecting what we want this newspaper to embody: a time capsule of life at our School.
A notable accomplishment of the newspaper staff is that we give every student a voice, ensuring that all writers are eligible for publication and that multiple writers are represented. We focus on school-related events and have a team of photographers documenting them. That way, our photos are mostly student-taken, reflecting our ideals of a student-run, student-operated newspaper.
So what does it take to be a journalist like the Five Star Journal staff? It’s really quite simple, actually. After each publication, we need to ramp up by starting our next edition with a pitch. A pitch is basically just a summary of what you’re planning on writing about. Once approved, the writers draft their roughs and send them to the editors to clean up grammar errors and verify that the article’s information is correct. We wouldn’t want our audience to receive incorrect information. Once sent to the corresponding editors for the category you’re writing for (News, Opinion, Sports, or Art & Entertainment), the editors send it back to the writers, who then input it into Canvas as a Final Draft for a grade. We repeat this cycle of pitch, rough draft, and final draft twice before a deadline. This means every writer should submit two articles and could potentially have both published in the newspaper’s print edition. Each article is available on our Five Star Journal website in digital newspaper format.
If you ask one of our staff what their favorite part of Journalism is, they’d probably say the camaraderie of everyone in the newsroom, but to this I can attest: there might be something a little better than that. It is our delivery day. This is when we deliver our newspaper to every classroom, and after returning to the School, we have a donut party to cap off the delivery. One fun thing after each newspaper publication is the unveiling of the “employee of the edition,” where we pick out who has been doing the best to make an edition.
The staff at the Five Star Journal works hard to provide content that better reflects what’s happening within IKE’s atmosphere. Most of us writers take pride in being published for such a big audience to read and critique our writing. Often, we show our family members when a publication is released because it means that our work is on display for the whole School to see.
