As the 2018 school year’s Editor-in-Chief of Etched in Stone, the newspaper staff and I have many goals for the publication as a whole. Our top priority is continuing to expand our coverage to all corners of Fossil Ridge High School activities, academics, athletics, and the student population in general. We are also looking to improve upon the design of our website, the quality and depth of our reporting, and our overall social media presence. We have built up a lot of these aspects already since my first year on the Etched in Stone staff, and I had hoped that with this upward trajectory we would be able to hit the ground running. However, one should keep in mind that on the path of life there will always be roadblocks and construction, and wishes do not come true overnight.

We are starting the year with five less people on the staff than the previous year, which is not a drastic change in some classes, but can greatly impede our ability to report on all events when many of our staff members are also busy with other school activities. Along with that, we are combined with the Journalism 1 class, which has mostly proved to be a logistical challenge as two distinct purposes that need to focus on separate things cannot easily work in the same space. While it does frustrate me that I do not always get to run the class like Editor-in-Chiefs in the past, I can view all challenges as a better learning experience that I would not have received otherwise. It’s important to have the ability to be versatile in a leadership position, or even any position in life, and not just complain about problems but constantly work for a solution to them. As we advance further into the school year, we are constantly organizing our coverage needs and holding our staff accountable for the news they have or have not published. We want to ensure that everyone at Fossil receives the representation they deserve, and consistently receives that representation throughout the year.  

Our new-and-improved website design did recently go live after an almost month-long process of getting district approval to change our web host, and transferring over all of our archives. We hope that a better website will allow students to interact with our staff and content more, and have a more enjoyable experience visiting our site. We are also still working to add more multimedia and interactive features to our website and increase our usage of our Instagram (@frhsnews), Twitter (@fossilnews), and Snapchat (@fossilnews) accounts.

I’m beginning to realize that it’s much more difficult to help an entire organization achieve goals than it is to complete personal ones, but as the year goes on we are working harder than ever to share Fossil news with all of our readers, and to increase that readership as well. As overall national trust in newspapers decreases, and more “fake news” appears online, we hope to be a trustworthy light in the dark and accurately inform readers about the events at Fossil. Whether you are a student, teacher, administrator, parent, or even an alumni, please feel free to comment on our articles, interact with our polls, or give feedback to myself or our advisor, Ben DeGear, as we are always looking for aspects of the school that need more coverage or ways we can improve our reporting.