Chris Lane, left, and SDHS junior Arin Hester were the driving forces in the creation of the school’s new digital journalism class set to begin in January.Soddy-Daisy High School’s social media pages are going to be busier in 2017. The school’s new media journalism class, headed up by broadcasting teacher Chris Lane, is set to start with the new semester, and will instruct interested students in the art of covering news that matters to them.
Lane, a former photographer and videographer for Channel 12 in Chattanooga, said his students will cover sporting events, extracurricular achievements, academics within the school and even interview administrators about current events at SDHS. The news will then be posted across the several social media platforms the school operates on, as well as a new webpage that will congregate the students’ writings.
“We want to treat it like a newsroom,” said Lane. “We want to get these stories out on Twitter, on our Instagram – stories, photos, videos; the whole digital media package.”
While Lane and the school administration will have final say over what gets posted to the pages, he stressed the importance of the stories and posts being as student-run as possible.
“They’re going to be going out doing the legwork, and at most I’ll say ‘This works’ or ‘Maybe I need to run that by somebody first,’ just to make sure we’re not stepping anyone’s toes,” he said.
The classes are the brainchild of current SDHS junior Arin Hester, who pitched the idea in 2015 after finding out that the advisory classes in which Lane instructed students on the finer points of running the SDHS website was going away. When Lane told her they weren’t going to be having the class, he said her first response was to ask whom she needed to talk to about changing that.
Ultimately, she talked to assistant principal Justin McCulley, who Lane said was impressed by how knowledgeable and determined Hester was.
With McCulley’s assistance, the new class was put together over the summer of 2015.
Hester said that before she took the entry-level AV class, she had planned to be a lawyer. After learning about media production from Lane, though, she quickly changed her mind.
One of the major goals of the new class is to show students aspects of the school that might not be broadcast to them through current channels. Both Hester and Lane agree that many students miss out on critical SDHS news because of the limited broadcast time of the daily announcements. Some school clubs, such as the student government association and the Beta Club, operate their own Twitter pages with updates for club members, something Hester said she’s seen work to great effect.
“With the social media aspect of all this, we want to get more students involved and informed about what’s going on,” Hester said.
Neither Lane nor Hester said they knew of any other high school in the district that teaches media journalism to this extent.
Hopefully, Hester said, the program will grow and become a regular part of the school’s online presence, helping the student body and community get information about a club member’s accomplishments, scholarships earned or records broken they might not have heard about otherwise.
“Really, we just want to have an informed student body,” said Lane.
Email Shane Foley at sfoley@timesfreepress.com