Marketing and Audience Engagement
Viewership:
Journalism today is no longer confined to printed newspapers or magazines, but rather, it lives in clicks, engagement, and the relationship between a story and its audience. During my time as both a staff writer and Editor in Chief for The Herd website, I learned that writing is not only about informing readers, but understanding how stories travel and resonate with people across cultures and backgrounds. These are truly the stories that drive conversation.
My work spans from breaking news coverage to the latest trends in pop culture. My work has been showcased on sources as small as my school's printed paper to as large as being cited in local news headlines. One of my earliest lessons in journalistic responsibility came from covering sensitive and time-critical news. One of my quickest grossing stories involves so-called "street takeovers" that began affecting towns surrounding mine, and eventually, targeting my community as well. Teenagers deserve to stay up to date on the news and current events around them, which can be mirrored in the viewership for this article, as website views skyrocketed after this article was published. This proves my peers truly care about their surrounding community and want to use their available resources to stay up to date. This experience taught me how credibility and audience trust are foundational to engagement; readers return to sources they believe are both accurate and fair.
As with many teenagers, I tend to avoid corporate television news in fear of bias views or depressing news. In seeing many recent headlines, I don't blame my peers for favoring the more light-hearted articles, mostly surrounding pop culture. The most viewed story across the entire Herd website is my article recapping 2025 pop culture trends. In this article, I hooked readers with a commonly viewed meme as the cover photo, and organized the piece into short catagorical paragraphs to retain attention. Although I would love to think that many of my peers frequently check The Herd website to stay up to date with stories, I acknowledge that my school of less than 600 kids is not very "media-focused," thus keeping our websites engagement small. Despite this, our website has had over twenty-three thousand total visitors and have read over eighteen thousand stories.
The data trends follow patterns in relation to when we publish a paper to pass out around school, and typically follow an upward trend from Septemeber (the start of the school year) onwards. Most importantly, my time on The Herd strengthened my overall journalistic skill set. I've learned how to research efficiently and write informative pieces that both educate and engage viewership. Journalism, as a whole, should be both meaningful and accessible to its audience- no matter the content or form.
Marketing:
In terms of the marketing side of my journalistic work, I contribute a lot for my success to The Herd's social media presence. During my time as Social Media Chair, I helped format posts for Instagram to both promote school news and encourage other writers to join.
Thanks to my amazing team of staff writers and editors on the newspaper, I've been able to step into my role as Editor in Chief and step back from the social media aspect of our marketing. I am grateful for my amazing team and I can rest assured that The Herd's social media presence remains professional and appealing to viewers.
