Welcome back to our blog where we discuss the happenings of the JagWire newspaper. After completing issue one, there was a huge sigh of relief. Issue one is the hardest issue each year because we’re still getting into the swing of how everything should work throughout the production cycle. The new staff members are getting used to a production cycle and accommodating to the stress from being on newspaper. Thanks to all that, along with the changes we had to make to our production schedule, transitioning into issue two wasn’t easy for the staff.

Due to receiving multiple days off last month — between parent-teacher conferences and the end of the quarter — timing just didn’t work out in our favor. We’ve had to push our production cycle back a week in order to give issue two the time and work that it needed. With such a large portion of the issue being election coverage, we wanted to provide an adequate amount of time to such an important topic in our school.

Since we are in an election year, we were able to cover it through a partially-themed issue where we focused mainly on politics. Instead of having one cover story, we covered multiple topics relating to the election, along with an additional political opinions section, including opinions that revolve around specific election issues. We later published our political content online in order to better reach the surrounding community.

With politics being such a delicate topic, we knew that when we decided to cover it, we had to be extremely careful and unbiased in our coverage. We did a mass survey of the entire school in order to provide insight as to what the majority of our school thinks about this election. Having an abnormally large survey, which consisted over 1,207 students instead of our normal surveys with about 250 students, proved to be difficult when it came to tallying up the results. Fortunately, we had help from some of the MVTV crew and were able to have all of the surveys counted before our final deadline.

Even with the election being so controversial, it’s important to talk about these political issues as they will affect the entire nation for the next four years. Due to the importance of the presidential and state elections, we did our best to remain unbiased to ensure fair coverage and to represent all sides of the political spectrum. We know that this is an important topic among students and we hope that others felt that the JagWire provided sufficient, balanced coverage.

Getting to cover such an impactful topic in our country at the local level was a truly amazing opportunity. There were so many things that we learned from this and we hoped that you learned a lot too.