Mother McAuley Review

Overall I would consider the Mother McAuley newspaper as a very well made and successful student publication. The paper was rather long, but throughout the entire thing I thought the McAuley staff did a good jobs of writing interesting articles that their students would want to read. One of my favorite pages in the paper was page 8 with the articles that debated whether or not the U.S. should accept Syrian refugees. This article was similar to the "vs." articles that we publish in the Beacon, however, I really loved the fact that at the end of each article the authors got two members of the McAuley community to give a statement about what they believe the U.S. should do. I think any opportunity to include more people from WY's community in our articles is an opportunity that we should take and this could be a fun way to do that. One thing that I didn't like about Mother McAuley's paper was that it didn't really cover sports very well. Their paper had two sports articles, however, both articles were the equivalent of our athlete spotlights. There were no articles that actually covered a sport's progress in their season or how they were doing this year. Although athlete spotlights can be interesting, I don't think a sports page in a newspaper can go without actually covering the sports that are in season and updating the the school community on how they are doing.

The Pritzker Press Review

     The Pritzker Press was my least favorite newspapers of the newspapers we received so far. However I think that The Beacon is still weaker than The Pritzker Press in a couple ways. Reading through the articles in this paper I didn't find any spelling mistakes which I thought was very impressive. However, I did happen to notice the article "Letter from the Editors" which stated that The Pritzker Press had over 130 journalism students in it with two levels of editing. After reading that line I actually expected a lot more out of The Pritzker Press since they are only producing an eight page paper. Still, I think that as a group we need to refine our editing process to be more efficient and successful in producing well-written essays. One thing I didn't like about The Pritzker Press was the police brutality article on page six. Although the article was a fairly interesting and well-written piece, I thought it was much too long. The majority of our audience wouldn't be focused or interested enough in the story to keep with an article that long. I though that to take up half of a page for that story with no picture was a waste of space. One article I did like was the article, "What is the IB Program?," because the article surveyed over 166 students at Pritzker about whether or not they would take IB classes. The article drew a lot of responses from Pritzker's student body and produced interesting results that people would actually want to read.

The Warrior Review

     I was less impressed by The Warrior than I was by The Saint Ignatius Spirit, however, I think that overall the paper was still very interesting and had several good elements in it. One small thing that I noticed right away was the cartoon. After first reading the cartoon I was extremely disappointed because the cartoon simply wasn't very funny. However, I noticed underneath the cartoon there was a small box underneath the cartoon saying "Cartoonist Wanted" and right next to that was another box saying "Advertise in the Warrior." I think that a cool addition to The Beacon could be to have a small section of ads from different organizations withing WY. For example, student council could advertise the next dance or NHS could advertise tutoring in the writing center. We could even put announcements from the administration in this section as another way of communicating upcoming school functions. Another interesting part of The Warrior was the fact that they had a section that included an advice column. I remember back when I was a freshmen The Beacon had an advice column and if there was someone in our class that would want to do it I think we could bring back an advice column to our paper. Hopefully in future years we could establish a large enough social media presence to receive questions through twitter, facebook, or even snapchat that our advice columnist could answer. The rest of The Warrior was pretty standard and nothing else really stood out to me. The kind of articles they wrote about were pretty similar to the ones we write in The Beacon. I will say, however, that the front page of The Warrior and even The Saint Ignatius Spirit were much better than our front pages usually are. I like that the front page of both of those papers were covered in pictures so that the majority of the front page was pictures and not words. I think their style of using more pictures just grabs the attention of students right away in a much more effective way than long articles.

The Saint Ignatius Spirit Review

     Overall, The Saint Ignatius Spirit was my favorite newspaper that we've received so far. This newspaper had the best layout, color scheme, font, and pictures of all three newspapers and the finished product looks extremely professional. The front and back pages were the best two pages of this newspaper in my opinion because they both looked extremely thought out. Using Saint Ignatius' school colors as the color scheme for their newspaper was a smart move and the layout of both pages is very creative. I love the back page with the flow chart stemming from the Saint Ignatius Wolfpack logo because it includes a ton of creative, funny, and most importantly interactive "bubbles." For example, one bubble asked a funny, open-ended question about Harry Potter and told students to tweet their answer using hashtags we made up. I think emulating something like this where we ask students to tweet their answer either "at" us or using our hashtag could be really successful and we could also offer our gift cards as rewards to them. Another part of the back page that I really like is the part where they highlighted three different students' tweets about Saint Ignatius. The reason I like this idea so much is because it is really fun for students to see their friends and themselves in the paper as well as get excited to try to be highlighted in this section for the next issue. The rest of The Saint Ignatius Spirit is professionally written and produced (they don't have random boxes around random parts of articles) and I think all of their pictures where very well taken. The pictures in the paper are especially worth noting because they were all taken by students and they all still look interesting and well produced. I hope that throughout the year The Beacon can evolve into a paper that looks as well made as this one.