DESIGN AND EDITING

During the 2018-2019 school season, I pushed for an online newspaper, and I was instrumental in converting The Bear Facts into an online publication. The reality was our staff did not have enough manpower to design and edit pages, or to write and edit stories in a timely manor. After observing the direction many professional publications were taking, I decided moving our newspaper online was indeed the direction our staff needed to go.

This change allowed us to cover more stories, more quickly. We were also able to capitalize on the versatility being online gave us. We added a weather tab with a forecast, as well as links to Bruin News Now, our weekly newscast, and Bruin Sports Radio productions.

Here is a look at our online newspaper along with a link to the actual site.

 https://thebearfacts.net/

When I joined The Bear Facts staff in August 2016 as a freshman, I was appointed sports editor. I wrote stories, edited stories and designed sports pages. I remained in that role through the end of the 2017-2018 school year, after which I took over as editor.

During the 2017-2018 school year, St. Joe sports teams brought home three state championships: The girls swim team in the fall semester and the boys soccer and boys baseball teams in the spring semester. I designed pages for all three issues, assigned all stories, edited the stories and also wrote for each edition.

Just like we do with every issue of The Bear Facts, we uploaded these special editions to issue.com so people who cannot access a hard copy of the paper can still read it as we intended to be read.

STATE CHAMPIONSHIP SWIM TEAM
Below is a copy of the Nov. 2, 2017, special edition commemorating the girls' swim team's starts championship. This was the third straight year the girls team won state.




STATE CHAMPIONSHIP SOCCER TEAM
In February 2018, the Bruin boys soccer team won its first state championship since 2011. Our school newspaper staff immediately went to work on another special edition of The Best Facts. Below is a full copy of the issue:

STATE CHAMPIONSHIP BASEBALL TEAM
After narrowly missing a trip to Trustmark Park for the sate championship series in 202178, the Bruin baseball team finally reached the championship and defeated East Union in a three-game series. It was the first time since 1978 St. Joseph Catholic School won testate championship in baseball.

I was intent on publishing a special edition, which originally was set to be printed during exam week. But when we ran into serious technical issues with our computer system at school, those plans almost failed because we had no way to file our stories and finish page design.

The computer problems were fixed later in the week after school ended for year.

Nevertheless, I thought that the baseball championship was such a major event, I really wanted to publish a special edition. So, with the approval of my journalism teacher, I came back after week after exams and after completed the newspaper. We published on Friday, May 25, 2018.

Here is a complete copy of that edition.