When the world went virtual in March of 2020, so did the work of my school’s newsmagazine. We had only started our website a month before lockdown, and the pride of our publication around then was the quarterly print issues that we sold throughout the school. When the new school year started in August,  I was promoted to Managing Online and Social Media Editor, and at the time, I couldn’t help but feel the slightest bit downtrodden - was there even a point in journalism when my role was - or so I thought back then - simply posting text and images on the web?

 

     But it was only through managing the online publication of all our content did I learn that storytelling could be so much more than simply words and pictures and go beyond the restrictions of print boundaries. This year, I took AP Computer Science Principles, which introduces high school students to HTML and Python as well as data management and UI/UX design. Equipped with this curriculum, I cautiously trode into the waters of multimedia journalism by coding a before/after image slider into our website. The painstaking care required for every detail - as one missing period or statement disrupted the entire code - drove me sleepless for many nights, but the successful end result encouraged me to continue. 

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      I began to observe other publications, such as the interactive charts of the New York Times or the slideshow galleries of the Washington Post, widening my eyes to the possibilities of bolstering our content. I self-taught myself how to adapt HTML code to our website, and how to teach images and graphics to respond to a hover or click from the user’s mouse. With assistance from Google Maps and Northwestern’s KnightLabs, I learned how to create timelines and maps that visualized information far better than a block of text could, and incorporate data from tediously-constructed Google spreadsheets and Excel sheets. Seeing these graphics properly work on our website was exhilarating, and the response from our viewers powered me on. 

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     Over a year later, our website has transformed, growing into the backbone of our company from its meager beginnings as a side feature. We are now completely online, needing only one print issue instead of seven. The website has received over 22,000 more pageviews, and our information has connected our school to its students, most of whom have not set foot on campus for the entire year. 

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     The feeling of exhilaration for me from each piece of work has not ceased, growing into a defining part of my identity. Being the Managing Online and Social Media Editor combines three of my biggest passions - writing, design, and web development - into my work in multimedia, but it also requires an unhealthy amount of coffee, a little bit of sleep deprivation, and late-night DMs with staffers to get the work done. I’ll hold the position of Editor-in-Chief next year, and I’ve never been more excited. I’m immensely thankful for everyone who guided me on this journey (shoutout to my two tough-as-nails EICs, my extraordinary advisor, and everyone on staff) and I can’t wait to be back in the newsroom in a few months’ time.