With a staff consisting of 23 students, we are all thrilled to produce timely and reliable content for The Pearl Post for the 2025-2026 school year.
In previous years, our staff has been split into two periods due to Career Technical Education class requirements, making communication often difficult between our staff. However, with our editors and staff writers now in a single period together, our goal is to strengthen our communication and teamwork skills to ensure an effective and productive work environment.
To ensure strengthening communication within our staff, we will use Slack to continue sending messages and updating one another about assignments. Additionally, we will hold consistent editor meetings once every week to discuss and plan monthly content on Basecamp for our online website and our bi-monthly newsmagazine.
Starting since last year, the district-wide phone ban is continuing to be reinforced on campus. Although we are given an exception as student journalists, it still heavily affects our workflow and prevents us from reporting efficiently. To prevent this phone ban from affecting our work, we will plan in advance in the scenario we need our phones on campus for an assignment.
This year, we have new faculty on campus. We are optimistic that this new administration on campus, especially our new principal, will support and celebrate our publication instead of constraining our work. Previously, our former principal would decline interviews and wasn’t supportive of our work as student journalists. We hope this is not the case with our new principal.
Our primary concern is maintaining a united, positive work environment. We want to make sure that each of our staff members feels welcomed and appreciated on staff. We believe that to be able to produce quality content we must have a positive work environment where staff is encouraged and supported. We will achieve this goal by respecting each other’s beliefs and viewpoints and create bonding experiences for our staff to connect with each other.
We plan to revamp our website to improve its design and usability for our audience. We want to continue posting at least three times a week on our website to keep content fresh. Posting on social media consistently to increase student engagement and ensure our audience stays up to date with the latest information is another goal we plan to achieve.
Increasing our multimedia coverage is also something we aim to do this year. We want to increase our video output by publishing a video a month on our YouTube channel instead of our old video platform Vimeo.
In addition, we want to be able to continue publishing episodes of our publication’s podcast, Room 22. Our goal this year is to make Room 22 into a bi-weekly podcast and continue expanding its reach.
We also want to ensure that our bi-monthly newsmagazine continues to be published on time. This year, our goal is to have five printed newsmagazines and prevent any from becoming online-only.
This year, we want to continue Quill and Scroll, the publication-run club. In past years, we’ve seen this club is able to bring memorable bonding experiences within our staff while also promoting our student media to interested students through photography and writing opportunities.
Last year, everyone on our staff was able to win at least one award issued by either Best of SNO and NSPA Clips & Clicks. We were named finalists for four categories at the Los Angeles Press Club Southern California Journalism Awards. We also were finalists for the prestigious Online Pacemaker presented by the National Scholastic Press Association. We hope to be able to continue this stellar trend this year.
With a team of both passionate, new and experienced student journalists, we’re beyond excited to continue working productively and efficiently in the newsroom this school year.
