Have you wondered what we actually do to publish these stories everyday? Have you ever questioned what we do to be so organized? Have you thought of where we actually write our stories and how we write them? Well, If you keep on reading, your questions about how we do this  thing journalism will be answered.

Every A day, students of the Journalism class write to publish stories for our website, The Lafayette Times. Stories are published everyday. With the small amount of time of an hour and a half, students work hard to put their original stories out there for everyone of Lafayette to read, watch, and laugh.

Journalism is the class for The Lafayette Times. There is only one class, and there’s nearly 30 of us writers in one room. We work in room 218, which is Mrs. McPherson’s room. The room may be small, but we manage to make our time there productive. Our class is also the first block of the A day. A lot of the writers are still tired and preferred the class to be later in the day.

Victoria Steward, one of the Editors-In-Chief says, “I liked it better when our class was third block last year because we had more time. Teachers were also at lunch so writers could talk to them for their stories”. Yes, it may be early and third block would have been a better block, but we still work to get published stories out on our site.

The staff of the Times writes their stories on computers. Usually, we get a Chromebook cart for our class to use, but sometimes when there are no Chromebooks available, the whole class has to go to a Lab down the hall. Zaida Bell-Frantz, the Clubs Editor says, “I like how we’re able to use Chromebooks in our own classroom. We can carry them around and we can just stay in our classroom mostly instead of going to a Lab”.

We write our stories on two websites. One is the Site Admin page of our Online Newspaper and another website for the “dirty work” of writing, which is called SnoFlow. The Site Admin is where we type our stories and SnoFlow is where we assign the stories, add important checklists, add categories, organizing to who edits what and what gets edited, and messaging the staff.

Our way of getting our stories published could be considered like an assembly line.

Each story requested to be written on the SnoFlow website has this ‘Checklist’ box that you have to check when you are finished with a part of your story.

The writer does their basic things; creating a headline, making a draft, writing the story, entering their name, choosing an image, and then sending the draft of their story to the Section Editor.

The Section Editor receives all of the drafts that are in their section category. They then make sure the draft has all the correct things the writer should have checked off in the box, then they read the draft and make any corrections that are needed.  The Section Editor then checks off all the things they have done in the Checklist box and then sends the story to the Copy Editors.

The Copy Editor simply checks the story for any grammar and spelling mistakes, then sends the story to the last part of the assembly line, the Editors-In-Chief. They review the story for the final time, make sure everything is 100% complete and correct, then publish the story onto our website for all of Lafayette to see.

What is left for The Lafayette Times story? Well, there are photos. We have two photographers, and they are the ones that make most of our story images.

They are very busy each day taking photos around school for our website.

This is only the beginning of what being apart of The Lafayette Times looks like, and it sure is fun! If you are now interested into being apart of The Lafayette Times next school year, then be aware that we do work a lot in this class, and we are very organized with publishing and when to publish our stories. It is hard work, but it does pay off when seeing your amazing stories being read by students of Lafayette!