Social Media
Over time, I’ve become more and more involved with ODYSSEY’s social media platforms. I’ve gotten to produce more content, from student life spotlights to promotions for website stories, and I’ve learned how to guide others to do the same. I always try to keep social media at the forefront of my mind when working on my own stories, as well as publishing others’ as promotions are the only way we’re going to reach our school community. Similarly, it’s the single best way for us to provide coverage to the students that make up a large portion of our audience and the first place they will go for any breaking news.
Social media calendar
In addition to my posting calendar for the website, I also work with the Social Media Coordinator to set her own posting calendar for Instagram. Every week, I go in and see what ideas she’s come up with and leave comments on things such as the variety of content, things I know we need to include such as upcoming holidays or birthdays. I also try to go over it with her in person pretty often to talk about any content I know other staffers are producing or to talk about content ideas we both have.
The analytics
NSPA Best Use of Social Media: Social Media Promotion: Second Place
NSPA Best Use of Social Media: Social Media Reporting: Second Place
At the end of the 2024-25 school year, I worked with the former Social Media Coordinator, Diversity and Representation Editor and Editor-in-Chief, along with our adviser, to compile these presentations for the National Scholastic Press Association’s Individual Awards: Social Media competitions. I helped choose what posts we would include, wrote some of the blurbs and compiled the analytics, and as we went through the staff’s work from the entire year, it was interesting to see the engagement for each in a much broader context.
Story promotion
By promoting web stories on social media, we are both making our information more concise and accessible, but also giving an entry point to the website, which most wouldn’t go to without.
Crafting success
I had originally planned to post a promo for this story, which was about a local adaptive art studio, on all of our social media platforms, but ultimately decided it wouldn’t serve much purpose on Instagram due to how adult-centric it was. Reserving it for Facebook didn’t alter how I designed it however, as I still focused on bringing as many images as possible, especially since a lot of them visually represented the studio’s mission.
Inkspired: Tattooing in Athens
The length of this story alone made it extremely difficult to fit everything into consumable graphics, but I managed to do it. I focused on only including the information that was essential to everything making sense and used the pre-existing sections of the story to guide my organization of the graphics. Instead of going with the usual design I use for these graphics, a colored background with white text, I decided to use a black background with a mix of purple and white text which I felt fit the overall style and palette of the story and visual elements a bit better.
The glory of '85
This package on our website was about our school’s last varsity football team to win a state championship 40 years ago, which I did three promotional posts for. The first, a basic overview of the story with photos, was posted the same day the package went up. The second, I used a piece of multimedia Sports Staffer David Wang had made about key figures from the team and made it more concise to fit into a series of graphics, went up about two weeks later. For the final post, I scanned over 20 photos of the team from that year’s yearbook and compiled them with a caption that added more context about the team into a post that went up on the day of the 40th anniversary. While these were spread out over several weeks, they helped continuously direct people back to the package and our website and continuously emphasize the significance of the story.
Events and breaking news
Timeliness is everything with these posts, especially since social media is where a large portion of people get their news, but under no circumstances can overshadow accuracy.
Athens Film Festival
I worked with Variety Staffers Cesia Martinez and Eloise Luken to make these graphics based on a local film festival the three of us along with other staffers had interviewed and taken videos at. The three of us collaborated to choose five people from the event we felt were notable or had good stories along with quotes from each. From there, Martinez compiled photos for each person that I put into a comprehensive series of graphics. Overall, this was a good way to provide coverage for a notable local event.
Prom 2025
While the interview for this caption was done by another staffer, I went behind her to pick out the quotes and write it up. She’d had a good interview, so I was able to find a detailed quote and had extra information that could be used in the second sentence to add some context. This was a good way to add a student reaction to such a prominent event and give some insight into student life.
Instructional Coach promoted to Assistant Principal
This breaking news post was for the promotion of CCHS Instructional Coach Alexis Scott to assistant principal. We were on Summer Break at the time, so I had to work with the photo the district had sent out with the press release. Between making the graphic and writing the caption based on the press release, I was able to get this up fairly quickly, which I was happy about.
One Act
CCHS’ One Act Team had come back from the regional competition with a lot of awards, so I worked with Social Media Coordinator Edie Ash to get a recap post up. The drama teacher had sent a few photos over and I was able to get more from one of the actors. Ash and I collaborated on questions for the interview, which I then used to write the caption. In the end, I’m happy we got as many photos as we did and the amount of information I was able to bring into the caption.
Scenes
These small, consumable stories about people (or sometimes) events in our school community are a good way to provide diverse coverage.
New agriculture teacher
This is a scene I did on a new agriculture teacher and his experiences with teaching before coming to CCHS. I had a really good interview with him, and spent a lot of time afterward trying to convey his story in the caption while still being concise. We posted a mix of photos myself and others had taken of him to get a variety of environments and angles, particularly of him teaching.
New special education department teacher
This was another scene I did on a new teacher, this time a special education one. I really wanted the caption to convey his “why” of going into teaching and had gotten a good quote about that from my interview with him. I tried to keep the amount of information and words in the first and second sentences on the lower side to use the full quote without making the caption overly long.
Black History Month spotlight
This was a scene I interviewed, wrote the caption and helped take photos for. When I was assigned to do a story on this person, a science teacher at my school, the only information I had been given and was able to find in research was that she had been a part of a sorority at a Historically Black College and University. In the interview, she talked a lot about her expectations for her students, so that’s where we got the inspiration for the photos to combine with the caption about her time in college. Through this scene, I was able to highlight a well-known teacher and talk about a part of her past that not a lot of students might have known about otherwise.
Senior spotlight
As part of a series then-Social Media Coordinator Liya Taylor was working on, I did a spotlight on a senior in the program. I interviewed him about his experience in ODYSSEY, wrote a caption and compiled photos of him from the past few years. HIs journey through the program was a bit different from most, which was something I tried my best to emphasize with the little space I had.
Graphics
While these always need to be balanced out with photos and school-centric stories, they are a good way to get information across in an engaging way.
Five ways to take care of your mental health
I made these graphics in honor of National Mental Health Day back in October. As high schoolers, I feel like a lot of people tend to forget to take the time to take care of their mental health so I wanted to give some simple, even if somewhat obvious, tips as a reminder of the importance of doing so. I did my best to keep the amount of text menial and the graphics bright and cheerful to make the information as engaging and clear as possible
Five things to know about Work-Based Learning
I made these graphics as multimedia for a story I had written about my school’s Work Based Learning Program and it doubled as promotional content on social media. I’d had a really good interview with the WBL Coordinator and didn’t want the quotes I had gotten to go to waste, so I decided to turn them into an informative graphic with other information interested students might want to know about the program.
President's Day Trivia
This was my first time making a trivia, so I was surprised at how it was fairly easy and how fast it all came together. I tried my best to write a variety of questions that didn’t all follow the same structure. I also tried to make the design of this fairly simple and follow a similar theme throughout to complement, rather than take away from the questions and answers. In addition to the trivia for Instagram, I also made an accompanying infographic to post on the website to give some basic facts about President’s Day and its history.