October Open House Issue Review

     I think the open house issue of the beacon was less successful than our first September issue because it wasn't as interesting as our first issue and it seems like there were more grammatical errors in this issue than in the September issue. My favorite page was page 2 with all of the teacher interviews and the 5x5. I liked the range of teachers that we had because we included teachers from almost every main department in Whitney Young while also showing the diversity of the Whitney Young staff. My two favorite interviews were the interview with Ms. Pasulka and the interview with Ms. Au. I liked Ms. Pasulka's interview because I thought that it would really appeal to parents who read her interview that Whitney Young has a staff member whose only role is to help improve the writing of Whitney Young students and teachers. I also liked Ms. Au's interview because it seemed a little more natural than some of the other interviews. What I mean by that is that she told a short story in her interview that didn't seem like a plug for why Whitney Young is perfect in every way, but instead was just a nice story related to how she got to Whitney Young. That being said Ms. Au was still able to say something nice about our school and our math team which works for being in the open house issue. I also thought the 5x5 was good for the Open House edition because even though the answers were a little short they did make Whitney Young sound good to our prospective students.
     My least favorite page was page 3 because once again we were unable to sort out our formatting issue with the box outlines around some of our text boxes. I also disliked page 3 because there were a lot of grammatical errors in Phoebe's article that I wish we would've caught and edited. I noticed her story had a lot of misuse with commas as well as a lot of other minor grammatical errors. For example after naming Luna Mac-Williams in the article she put "18'" with the apostrophe after the 18 instead of before. Small details like this could've been easily avoided and would've added to the quality of the issue. I also thought Claire's article on page 1 about the open house was a kind of weird story to put in the open house edition. Although I understand that the article was supposed to serve as a kind of message to prospective students that Whitney Young is excited to have them at our school it still seemed a little strange to include. Overall I think that the issue was pretty good and served its purpose well, but that it could've been improved just a bit to be a little more successful.

Fast Facts: What you need to know about WY

Dillon Jacobson
Sports & Health Editor

- WY has over 200 clubs including Model United Nations, Breakdancing Club, Eco Club, and Robotics club to name a few.

- WY is ranked as the #2 most diverse school in America, according to niche.com, with a student body comprising of approximately 29.3 percent white students, 25.1 percent African American students, 24.4 percent Latino students, 16.7 percent Asian students, and 4.5 percent of students listed as multiracial or other another race.

- WY students have an average composite ACT score of 27.5 compared to the national average of 21.0.

- WY had 3 seniors with perfect ACT scores this year.

- WY alumni include First Lady Michelle Obama ‘82, directors Andrew Wachowski ‘86 and Lana Wachowski ‘83, former NBA player Quentin Richardson ‘98, current Philadelphia 76ers basketball player Jahlil Okafor ‘14, and hip hop artist Vic Mensa ‘11.

- WY offers 61 honors level courses and 28 AP courses to its students. Additionally 79% of students taking AP courses score a 3 or higher on their AP exams.

- WY students have a 95.5 percent attendance rate.

- WY offers 17 sports to students and has over 800 athletes.

- WY offers 7 different languages to its students including Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Latin, and American Sign Language.

- WY is the current School of Champions. Whitney Young won 11 city-championships, more than any other CPS school during the 2014-2015 school year.

- WY won the 2014-2015 Poms, Academic Decathalon, and Academic Center Cross Country state championships.

- WY has 115 teachers, 34 of whom are National Board Certified.

-Over 10,000 students apply to WY every year.

- WY is a nationally recognized blue ribbon school.

September Beacon Issue Review

     Overall I think our first issue of the Beacon was a success, especially with only two weeks to brainstorm and assign story ideas, write and edit our stories, and format the newspaper. Although there were many little things I would change about the issue we put out, as a whole, the newspaper looks clean, well thought out and interesting. Most the of the issues with this paper were due to a lack of experience with inDesign and writing stories for the Beacon, both of which will improve throughout the year.     

     My two favorite pages of this issue were the News and Opinions pages. Both of these pages were the best formatted and had the best stories of this issue on them. Even if there were formatting errors on these pages, at least they were consistent. My least favorite page of this issue was the Student Life page because I think there was a lot more that could've been done on that page. I thought the fashion icon article was a little underdeveloped with only 3 questions and I didn't like that one of the pictures wasn't of the fashion icon in an outfit. I also think we should've put something in place of the word search like a hotspot article, or at least given some incentive for doing the word search like a gift card reward.

     However, the biggest problem I had with this issue was the lack of consistency in the formatting of each page. On several pages, certain stories would be outlined with black boxes while others were left without any kind of border and there were even stories where parts of the story were outlined with boxes while other parts of it were left alone. Another consistency issue was that the information in the heading boxes of each page in the top left and top right corners was formatted differently on each page. Some of these boxes were in complete sentences with punctuation, while others were fragments of sentences without punctuation. Although all of these issues are very small and easy to fix, if we can make our formatting consistent in the next issue, it will raise it to the next level.