As the 2022-23 school year ends, the Pathfinder Editorial Board begins to reflect on the past and look onto the incoming school year. Together, we have curated a list of goals we hope to accomplish for the Pathfinder. 

Diversity

As a school newspaper, our site should act as a window into the daily lives of students at Parkway West. To achieve this responsibility of thoroughly representing and celebrating the amazing diversity at our school, we will:

• • Increase our coverage of activities sponsored by students at our school, holidays and other events going on in our community that impact people our community.
  • Extend our efforts for diversity across all stories, not just those about certain topics like race or culture. Diversity should not be a simple box to check off or a tokenizing effort. We will seek to encourage all writers to interview people whom they may not know or typically talk to. 

Accessibility

Everyone who visits our site should be able to engage with our content easily. We will change our site to better adhere to recommended web content accessibility guidelines. These changes include:

• • Requiring alt-text for all images uploaded to our site. 
  • Continuing our use of captioning and transcripts on multimedia content. 
  • Keeping accessibility in mind when designing our website and providing the best website for our readers, such as implementing a colorblind-friendly color scheme.
  • Accommodating pro-accessibility features like colorblind toggle and providing tools and features, such as a read-aloud toggle, that we can find.
  • Providing simple-text alternatives for longer stories that may need them.
  • Listening to what our readers need to access our site. If you have questions or concerns, please contact the Editorial Board under the “more” tab on our site. 

Interactivity

The Pathfinder was one of the first school newspapers to jump from print to online. As a program, we always want to innovate and respond to modern trends in our readership and new advances in journalism. To make our site more engaging for our readers, we plan to:

• • Use tools like Genial.ly and Thinglink to make our content more interactive.
  • Implement extra features beyond plain text, like graphics or photography, for most stories. 
  • Explore how artificial intelligence tools can be used on our site to create a more personalized experience for our readers. 
  • Encourage writers to gain reader attention in unique and creative ways, such as through social media posts and interactivity options.

Coverage and variety

In the past, we have traditionally focused on News, Opinions and A&E. As our program grows and modernizes, we hope to diversify our coverage to appeal to more readers. Additionally, we hope that our writers have the opportunity to use their range of incredible talents to create work that matters to them. This means:

• • Increasing our coverage of sports and the student-athletes at our school.
  • Increasing our use of multimedia, such as podcasts and videos. 
  • Growing our A&E section by encouraging writers to start unique columns about topics they are passionate about. 
  • Continuing to do quick turnaround news briefs on events at school. 
  • Increasing our photo coverage and encouraging writers to strengthen photographic elements in their stories.

Reach a larger audience and incoming students

We want our site to be the place for students to visit when they want to read interesting stories or learn about our school community. Furthermore, we want all students who enjoy writing or journalism to know about our program and be able to join our staff if they are interested. So, we hope to widen our reach at school, especially to incoming freshmen just starting high school. We will accomplish this by:

• • Increasing our social media presence to connect with students more.
  • Covering the events that students want to hear about in a timely manner. 
  • Marketing our stories and site through diverse platforms: in-person, email and more.
  • Starting outreach to Parkway West Middle through events like Curriculum Nights.

We genuinely hope these changes can create a stronger and better newspaper for our community. We look forward to building upon all that we have done together. Thank you to our readers, advisers and graduating seniors for a wonderful year. 

Sincerely,

The Pathfinder 2023-24 Editorial Board