February Issue Beacon Review

The February issue of the Beacon was the best newspaper that we have put together all year. I'm glad that as the year has progressed, our issues have seemed to steadily increase in quality, however, with each issue it seems a new problem presents itself. For this issue, that problem was our overuse of graphics and pictures from the Internet and our lack in consistency in sourcing those graphics and pictures. Our different forms of sourcing these photos both from the Internet as well as our own staff members was my least favorite part of this issue by far because it was extremely obvious and inconsistent. Different forms of sourcing photos from outside sources ranged from sentences such as "All picture courtesy of pitchfork.com" to simply "Google Images." I think simply saying "Google Images" is an extremely unprofessional way to give credit for a photo because it really isn't giving credit to anybody. We should at least be able find the website that the photo came from and give credit to that site. Additionally, we were inconsistent in crediting our own staff members for taking photos. On the front page under the picture for the first article we have, "Claire Bentley/ Staff Photographer" and on the last page for the hotspot article picture we wrote, "Photo courtesy of Billy Roche '16." Small inconsistencies like this are the things that keep our paper from moving from good to great.  Granted, we've never been told exactly how we should source a photo or graphic in the Beacon, and I myself didn't think twice about it when I wrote, "Photo courtesy of www.allys-allies.com," the editors should communicate more with each other to avoid problems like these. The good news is that this issue is extremely easily fixable. Moving forward we should simply establish a clear, definite way to give credit for our photos. 

Besides the inconsistent sourcing of our photos, however, I really enjoyed this issue of the Beacon. All of the editors deserve props for their pages in this issue because each one was extremely thought out and it showed. I was personally extremely proud of the way the Sports page ended up coming together, but my next second most favorite pages were the Opinions page and the Features page. I thought that the Teacher's Matchmaking Guide was a clever and fun theme for this issue's Features page and was definitely one of the most interesting pages in the paper. The match-ups and answers were funny and unexpected and I think everyone reading this issue enjoyed seeing which teachers got paired with each other. I also thought that the Opinions page was successful because it had a wide range of different and interesting topics. Phoebe's Heard in the Halls article was funny and entertaining, Maia and Tatiana's articles were political and interesting, and the versus articles by Katherine and Luke were relevant to WY students. The mixture of different types of articles all came together in an aesthetically pleasing page and simply worked together. Finally, I loved the new Beacon header that Peter created for this issue. I think that it's really cool to create a header that is unique to our specific Beacon class. Although it was a little stretched out and pixelated, the header still looked nice and I don't think that touching it up or resizing it for our next issue will be too hard.