Important Dates

Our next meeting will be on October 22, 2009 in Mrs. Gautier's room (209) until 3:15. If you have any questions, please see Mrs. Gautier or Justin Kiefer.

The week of October 5-9 is Spirit Week! Don't forget to show off your school colors!

On October 9, the biggest home football game of the year will commence. Don't miss a moment of it!

          Having a good read so far? I know you’ll enjoy the new paper, just as I enjoyed putting it together. Make no mistake, it’s been a long arduous process to get The Scarlet Scoop running the way I wanted it.

Several days after my junior year of high school ended, I was exercising in my basement and thinking, as I often do, about the next school year. I knew that the editorial torch had been passed down to me by our former editor, Rebecca Litz, and I was contemplating ways in which we could get people to join the staff of The Scarlet Scoop. We had lost a number of seniors that year who had made up a bulk of the paper’s writing staff, and as you can imagine, I was worried. Would I be able to find committed students with a passion for writing and journalism? Would there even be a Scarlet Scoop?

Then, halfway through a pull-up, it hit me. I needed to stop thinking about who would write for the school paper, but instead focus on how it would be presented.

The Scarlet Scoop had been, up until that point, a relatively static entity: a mere collection of written articles put into a PDF document with clip-art.  I needed to find a way to make the paper more dynamic in order to catch people’s attention. Realizing that many universities had moved to an online student newspaper, it made perfect sense for us to do the same. In today’s Facebook and MySpace world, where kids snap a photo of every passing moment, or roll the tape at a football game, who wouldn’t be interested? Now our paper would be so much more than a plethora of written articles, it would be a media powerhouse!

I knew it wouldn’t be easy from the beginning. I had done basic web design before, and although I have a general knowledge of the coding used for making websites (HTML), I had never taken it this far. Needless to say, I’ve always been a firm believer in the ability of a man to do anything if he sets his mind to it, and what you see here is a perfect example of that.

In lieu of my worries, it worked. Not only is the website gorgeous, but most importantly, we have a fresh staff of eight writers, each with their own unique interests and writing styles! It is a pleasure to have them onboard, because without them, what would the purpose of this endeavor be?

I’ve put many hours into the new Scarlet Scoop, and as a senior in high school with many hard classes, extra-curricular activities and college anxiety to boot, free time is a luxury. However, I love to write and be on the front-lines of almost any school event, and I hope that this passion shines brightly not only in the pages of our new paper today, but in its future as well. As always, time will tell.

-Justin Kiefer