Marketing &
Audience
Engagement
My approach to engaging audiences
A journalist must understand their audience for their stories to reach people.
When writing for a general audience, complex topics tend to get simplified. That’s why it’s important for my team and I to know our audience, so we can contextualize the nuances and the complexities to them.
The nice thing about being a student reporter is that you’re constantly around your audience, students and teachers. Anytime I hear another student talk about Wingspan I send a message in our group chat highlighting what I heard. After I did that a few times, the rest of my team followed.
The weekend before an issue is planned, I pull together all the feedback we’ve heard, data from our website and personal input from teachers and students.
Through this I’ve seen three important trends. Everyone likes interactive pages. Students talk the most about controversial topics and profiles. Teachers talk about localized news pieces.
Understanding your audience doesn’t just happen because you care. It happens through constant team effort and spotting patterns.
How we do advertising
Wingspan advertisements is a group project directed by our Advertising Director Isabella Nelson. She creates a list of previous advertisers along with other Nixa and Springfield businesses. Then Wingspan members cold call those businesses. If a business is interested in buying an ad, the student goes to the business with an advertising guide, which includes information about pricing, sizing, dates and contact information. We divide up the work so everyone learns sales and marketing skills.
Distribution
Our distribution process is a well oiled machine. We manage a 1,000-issue distribution in the school district and the community. The day before distribution we put all the magazines into folders for every classroom in the building. Distributing roughly 640 magazines throughout the high school takes us 30 minutes. We also mail copies to public libraries, advertisers, district buildings, neighboring schools and former Nixa Journalism students.
Identifying audience interests
Website polls
To pull in more website viewers, Wingspan’s website editor and I implemented interactive polls focused on timely and relevant topics, such as winter break, artificial intelligence and phone policies. Because engagement varies by topic and timing, we monitor trends from our polls throughout the year.
The collected data will allow future Wingspan staff to identify patterns and adapt their future coverage including articles, broadcast videos and even the Nixa Journalism Instagram account.
Wingspan survey
As a data science nerd myself, I love when infographics are used in reporting. Because people like content that is easy to consume, I began creating regular surveys to collect data for infographics. The surveys, which go to all high schoolers, ask multiple choice questions related to stories currently being written. Survey results are then incorporated into Wingspan, helping our audience understand what their peers think.
The response rates vary, usually starting 150 to 200 responses at the beginning of the school year and ending the year around 100 responses. The last two questions are open-ended asking for topic suggestions and students willing to be interviewed. These surveys help me match coverage with student interests while giving our audience more insights.
Getting feedback from intro students
Introduction to Journalism students are one of Wingspan’s most consistent audiences. As part of their coursework, students review Wingspan publications and provide feedback, which our staff collectively reads and discusses. Their feedback gives insight into what resonated, what needs improvement and which topics they want to see covered. Because Wingspan rarely has freshmen on staff, this process is essential in getting freshmen perspectives into our decisions.
Getting students engaged
Profile stories
When we put a band student, in their uniform, on the cover of the winter edition last year, I saw more students holding magazines that week compared to a normal distribution week. Students like seeing their friends, themselves and their activities covered. So, we started doing consistent profile stories. First, we covered three new teachers and three top football players. The profiles were a big point of compliments in our feedback from the intro students. We’ve continued doing two of these stories per issue, covering students with unique hobbies, substitute teachers and cultural backgrounds.
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Localizing stories
When I first joined the Wingspan team, I noticed that we kept doing articles about national topics, like artificial intelligence, but did not specialize the content to Nixa students. I thought about these topics and realized they had clear connections to Nixa. For example, the usage of AI is currently being debated at our high school because administration is planning to create a special committee to regulate it.
As editor-in-chief, I normalized localizing topics. My article “Campaigns Target Youth” was one of my first localized news topics. The 2024 election was approaching and instead of covering information that was already out there I targeted the story on new social media strategies that were being used this election, specifically to target new voters such as high schoolers.
My power as a student reporter comes from my community connections.
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Games
When I first wanted to add games to our magazine, the team was iffy. Even with concerns, we tried and it turned out amazing. Every time I saw a Wingspan laying on a table at the high school, I’d open it to the games pages and see the completed puzzles. Since creating interactive pages, we’ve seen more students reading Wingspans.
