Getting a school newspaper online

Dave Tow and Kenya Vance experiment with SNO

We were incredibly lucky to have Kari Koshiol in attendance at the Reynolds Institute at ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Kari, who teaches at Benilde-St. Margaret's School in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, also works as a training specialist for School Newspapers Online.

While many of us were working on our articles Wednesday and Thursday afternoon, Kari was enthusiastically answering questions about SNO and helping colleagues navigate and troubleshoot their SNO sites and adjust their Institute stories for online publication. I knew how to embed the code for my audio clips in my article, but I needed help positioning the clips and re-sizing my photo. Kari to the rescue! More questions today about advertising on a SNO site. Kari had answers. Then today she led an afternoon session on using SNO. I really appreciated her energy and enthusiasm.

Last August, as I was preparing to teach journalism, I looked into SNO but decided against it because of the cost. I had experience creating class blogs on blogger and wordpress.com, so I considered just posting stories to a blog and using that as an online newspaper. Ultimately after reading about the differences between wordpress.com and wordpress.org, I decided to use .org because it offered more flexibility. That involved some extra work on my part, including paying a web hosting service (I chose bluehost.com, which costs $50-$95 per year, depending on the current promotion), and learning a little about widgets and plug-ins and a few other technical details. They walk you through the set-up process, so it's not too bad if you can't afford SNO. You do have to be willing to do some YouTube tutorials and work your way through the occasional glitch.

I would certainly choose SNO if I had the funding -- there are a lot of obvious benefits, including ongoing support and ease of set-up -- but if you're ever in a position where you don't have the budget, it can be done for less. And once you get the site up and running, it really feels almost the same as using SNO -- so if that made sense to you, then you could do it my way. Here's my site, if you want to take a quick look to compare.

Thanks again, Kari!

David Strom
North-Grand High School
Chicago, Illinois