Hancock High School Newspaper Review

Hancock High School's "The Signature" was a very odd newspaper compared to the other papers that I have seen so far. Although their paper was eight pages in total, the content of "The Signature" seemed much more shallow and less varied than our paper typically is. There were no official sections that separated their articles ion each page, but rather articles seemed to be simply placed one after another in a row of pages. There was very little organization and that, combined with the layout the editors came up with, made for a very confusing paper. The one part of the paper that was "organized," was the section titled "Whatchoo got to day?" However, even where there was supposed to be some sort of organization and order, the Hancock editors made their layout extremely confusing. This section stretched out onto four out of eight pages of "The Signature" and changed titles twice from "Whatchoo Got to Say?" to "More of Whatchoo Got to Say" to "Whatchoo Said." The lack of consistency, in addition to placing this section onto four pages, was very weird and didn't really make sense to me. In fact, three out of the four other articles not in the "Whatchoo Got to Say" category ran onto multiple pages. The article titled, "Can Anyone Be a Leader?," which ran onto three pages, also changed its title on a different page to just "Leaders" and even switched which side of the paper it was on. Overall I thought that the layout really took away from this paper and made it less interesting and more confusing.

Although the format of "The Signature" was bad, the thought behind the articles was a little better. I thought the "Humans of Hancock" piece and the "College Is Not for Everyone" article were both interesting and relevant to their audience. However, a lot of the journalistic fundamentals that Mr. Rehak has been teaching us all year were still missing in those pieces. Simple things such as forgetting to end a quote with a second quotation mark, missing the year or position of a staff member, and other grammar mistakes were prevalent in these articles. The best feature of "The Signature" was its use of pictures and specifically the fact that it had only original pictures taken by the paper's staff members. Although I think "The Beacon" is probably a better paper overall than "The Signature," I don't know if we've ever put out a paper that has done that in the last two years.

Taft Newspaper Review

Taft High School's newspaper, "Taft Today," was my least favorite newspaper that we have reviewed so far. I thought that the issue Taft sent to us was a very average paper compared to other school's papers we have seen and far below the standards of "The Beacon." While flipping through the pages of "Taft Today," I was most bothered by the layout and design of each page. Although Taft didn't use any online pictures or pictures taken by people outside of their newspaper staff, they overused graphics and drawings in their paper that made their paper look less polished and professional. Additionally, I thought the font choices, picture placement, and color scheme were poorly chosen and lowered the quality of the paper. I especially disliked the fact that in every article, any and every pronoun was bolded so that it stood out darker than the rest of the text around it. That decision doesn't really make sense to me and, again, reduces the quality of the paper as a whole. My least favorite part of the "Taft Today," however, was the comic on page eight. I thought that the comic used a very basic and unoriginal form of humor. Although some people might criticize Billy's "Casheu Jones" for using the same silly or "stupid" joke in each new comic, every time the joke is reused it becomes funnier and funnier. I didn't see any kind of originality that made the comic in Taft's paper funny or interesting and so I didn't enjoy reading it. Overall, I did not enjoy the "Taft Today" newspaper and I think that as a staff we are thoughtful enough not to make the decisions (mistakes) that Taft's newspaper staff made.