New advisor, editors tackle changes to improve Gilroy High
School’s paper
Gilroy- A stack of San Jose Mercury News papers, waiting for students to pick up on their way in, sit neglected at the gates entering Gilroy High School. And, like those papers, many copies of the GHS Free Press last year ended up in the trash bins dotting campus not long after they were handed-out.
Campus conversations tend to revolve around Mustang sports or what’s going on this weekend, not the Kyoto Protocol or the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy, but don’t blame GHS for being out-of-touch media wise.
High school students, in general, aren’t exactly news junkies, so when Mirra Shernock took over as journalism teacher this year she didn’t resolve to reverse the trend, instead she went the practical route – printing fewer copies.
And when the student-run paper released its first publication of the school year in October, she was pleasantly surprised.
“I was pretty happy,” said Shernock, smiling. “I checked the trash cans and I didn’t see any.”
Shernock, who began teaching English at GHS a year ago and was asked to take over the newspaper program this year, isn’t trying to rock the journalism boat, but her staff is definitely attempting to make some impressive changes.
“We’re trying to become entirely self-sufficient,” said David Bress. “It gives us more say if we’re the publishers.”
Bress and Robben Beckman, both co-editors along with managing editor Chris Morsilli, comprise what they describe as the “tri-pod” heading the Free Press‚ editorial department. They receive some funding from the high school but because printing the paper costs so much cash, sell, sell, sell has become their motto.
This time around it cost about $700 to print a couple thousand editions. The printing price tag – they’re printed by the Salinas Californian – rises or falls depending on the size and the amount of color pages.
The Free Press crew – a total of 35 students make up the staff – are doing well on the advertising end since local businesses are especially supportive.
“There’s a lot of go-getters on the staff,” said Morsilli.
The students staged a male beauty pageant recently and managed to raise $850 but expect the main bulk of their cash to come from advertising.
In the past the advertisements were clumped together in one section, instead of interspersed, like mainstream newspapers. In their effort to make the paper more realistic the staff has made the ads better and has spread them throughout the paper.
The staff has also changed the design of the paper, making it more accessible to high school students by including a lot of pictures and discussing issues, such as underage access to abortion, that are more applicable to teens.
Since the paper is released monthly – the second edition was distributed Friday – the staff has to ensure that subjects aren’t too timely. For the recent edition they included writing an article on the execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, but in the end decided that it would be old news by the time the paper came out.
To combat the timeliness issue, a lot of the time they write op-ed pieces on school policies, such as the bell schedule.
In this edition they feature a student who competes in body-building contests and in October they profiled a girl who is striving to qualify for the Olympics in rifle shooting.
“I think the hardest thing with the timeliness is the sports,” said Morsilli. “Basically we just try to think ‘are people still going to be interested in this in a month?’ ”
