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.

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.