Photo by Wendy Borrelli

Posing for a picture with Print Editor-in-Chief Maya Panicker and Print Managing Editors Abby Kee and Elli Karistinou. We presented to our all-school Booster Club, requesting $7,500 to cover half of Pitch's annual operating costs.

Marketing & Audience Engagement

In a school of over 3,000 students, building an engaged and involved reader base is not an easy task. As Editor-in-Chief, I have relied on social media and word of mouth to spread the word about our class and our paper, to make sure every student knows and relies on The Pitch.

Marketing

A Consistent Pitch Brand

As part of the social media redesign (see: Design) we also revamped The Pitch watermark that we used on all Instagram posts to align with our masthead. Previously, while still a letter "P", the Instagram watermark was not in line with other elements of our brand. The new "P" watermark was also implemented as the favicon of our website, which was previously just a Wildcat paw. Therefore, the new "P" logo is used ubiquitously as a representation of The Pitch. This consistency in branding also occurred as we standardized our color palette of greens, given the many different hues and shades that we were using prior to this standardization.

Old vs new Pitch watermarks. The new watermark, derived from our masthead, is also used as our website's favicon.

The Pitch masthead

The Pitch color palette

Advertising for Journalism 1

Every year, we advertise signing up for our introductory Journalism 1 course, the prerequisite course for joing The Pitch. This year, in order to promote sign-ups and prevent our class from being threatened by budget cuts or staffing reductions, we made sure to get as many sign-ups as possible. Sending pairs of Editorial Board members to every single 9th and 10th grade English class in the school, we gave a quick two-minute presentation on signing up for Journalism and handed out flyers. Working with our Print Managing Editors, this coordinated effort led to a resurgence in enrollment for the course.

Our poster for promoting J1 enrollment

A Big Audience

For each print issue, we print 3,000 copies, enough for almost every student in the school. During days of distribution, using pre-prepared maps made by our Print Managing Editors, every member of The Pitch staff is assigned a set of rooms to go deliver copies of The Pitch to, and within 45 minutes, the entire Pitch is distributed. Copies are also mailed to our patrons, other schools in the county, and to the Board of Education and superintendent for their perusal. During distro, besides working my own map, I help with unpacking the stacks of Pitches and coordinating groups together for distributing.

Pitch staff members huddle around stacks of Pitches to get a look at Volume 70, Issue 2, before distributing later that period. (Photo by Seyun Park)

Social Media

As addressed in web and social media, The Pitch has a robust social media presence, averaging 54,000 views per month between September and December 2024. As a part of the social media redesign I spearheaded this year, our efforts in social media have expanded much beyond posting one article a day. We now run Instagram Exclusive photo galleries, repost Best of SNO story winners, and promote print publication and distribution, among other engaging posts to keep our audience engaged beyond just the articles on our main website. We also re-activated our TikTok account this year to reach more WJ students.

A TikTok promoting our first print issue

Business Management

<< Law, Ethics & News Literacy

Fundraising

Each year, about half of our yearly operating budget comes from the All-School Booster Club. We raise the other half through patron donations, advertising and other fundraising sources like running the concessions stand at athletic events. In the past two years, I have helped put together and present a fundraising request presentation to the board of the Booster Club, who votes to approve our funding. This year, we were approved for $7,500 in funding from the Booster Club.

This year's slides for our booster club funding request presentation

Analytics

In order to know what's working and what's not, we have taken full advantage of analytical tools available to us on our website and social media pages. Based off of what the data tells us, we try to optimize our content to match our readers. For example, we discovered last year 60% of our readers read our site from mobile, so I led a redesign of our mobile website to be sleek and clean, not just a cramped version of the desktop website. We also look at which articles do best, and analyze what seperates those articles from other ones we publish.

Data from Google Analytics showing what devices users view our website from. After seeing this statistic, I started an initiative to overhaul our mobile web design.

This is a heat map generated by Hotjar, another analytics tool we use. It shows how far the average user scrolls down on the home page before clicking away and the most clicked areas.

Advertising

In each print issue, on average, we dedicate around 2 of our 16 pages to advertisers. Working together with a team of three business managers, we draw advertisements from local small businesses (restaurants, driving schools, test prep, etc) as well as university programs like the University of Maryland Merrill College of Journalism and UMD Persian Flagship program. In addition to print advertising, I was also responsible for setting up our snoads.com advertising, which generates ad revenue through our partnership with School Newspapers Online.

Our snoads.com listing

Purchasing & Budgeting

While we have kept our operating budget relatively consistent in the two years I have been on the Editorial Board, some costs have increased. For example, our web hosting fee from SNO increased over the summer this year. In addition, we have made capital purchases like acquiring the DJI Ronin-SC camera stabilizer and a new batch of lavalier mics to bolster our multimedia content production. Together with our online managing editors, we created a purchasing list and budgeted our needs for the year in August.

Our yearly invoice from SNO Sites

Purchasing list

Newly purchased

camera stabilizer

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