Entrepreneurship
Audience
The Playwickian's audience originally consisted only of students and staff of the High School, but over the years we have begun distributing to the local middle schools, elementary schools, libraries, and community centers. We have become more popular in recent years for readers outside of the Neshaminy community due to some news coverage we received nationally and some of our editors' work outside of the paper. Our paper is also brought to conventions like the Columbia Scholastic Press Convention in New York each year and added to the available content for students reviewing publications. Our website receives tens of thousands of hits each year, according to records from 2014-2015, and we typically print 500-1000 copies of each addition of the newspaper.
Our community is fairly socially conservative, as compared to those which surround us, and typically elects only conservative politicians to national and state offices. There is a large population of eastern European families in the school district, and the community here has a Caucasian majority. Generally, most of our readers have at least partial high school educations, due to the newspaper's status as a scholastic publication, but a great deal of our readers are college graduates, considering much of the feedback we receive is from teachers, both current and retired.
Appeal
To engage our audience, The Playwickian has a policy that all stories should relate back to the Neshaminy community-- either it must appeal to teens in general, or reference back to the issues that the Neshaminy area is facing specifically. Of course, this is oftentimes a challenge with national issues, especially regarding politics or natural disasters, so we work to have comments from students, teachers and community members addressing their thoughts on the issues at hand and relating any personal connection they may have to whatever subject is being covered (for example, if we're discussing a hurricane, we might try to find a community member who has family in the area that was affected and quote them discussing how their relatives are handling the recovery).
Each editor on the Playwickian staff is required to sell at least one advertisement per school year, although some have sold up to a dozen in that time frame. As Editor-in-Chief, in my junior year, I made sure that we expanded our advertisement program so that local businesses could by space on our website, which can be seen here (the advertisement space should appear to the right).
Due to a 50% budget cut to the newspaper between my freshman and sophomore year of high school, we were struggling to figure out how we would be able to publish our paper at all the following year. After some discussion, a fellow editor and I decided to start an Indegogo campaign, inspired by the one which had been created by the Foothill Dragon Press to support our publication after some administrative conflict the year before. We raised $1,350 of the $2,000 dollars that had been cut from our budget. I personally created the illustration which was given to those contributors who donated $100 or more, which depicts a bald eagle inside of a cage-like broadcasting microphone.
The original illustration of this is shown here. It was edited digitally to improve on a few mistakes I had made in its creation, and then printed and mailed to those who had donated the corresponding funds. I personally handled the distribution of all perks for this fundraiser.
As Editor-in-Chief, I have worked with my Management team to plan several fundraisers for the Playwickian in the years following this. We have hosted a handful of events at a local frozen yogurt shop, Top It, and another fundraiser at Sandwich Club, a local deli-style restaurant. Although these fundraisers have helped to fill the large gap in our budget left by the cuts, we remain unable to print as often as we once did. In the past we printed about seven editions per school year, including a double-length June edition, while in the past two years our budget has limited us to around four editions per year, including the aforementioned June edition, which is distributed at graduation.
Because the Playwickian is now considered, in policy, as government speech we are forbidden to publically link student-run social media accounts to the official Playwickian website. Although it may benefit us in some ways, the staff does not plan on relinquishing control of our social media accounts to the school, as they are the only part of our publication not subject to a 10 day prior review period. We struggle to update our social media accounts, and have recently opened a position for students to apply as social media managers to help in this, although at this time the duty of running our social media accounts remains scattered amount our editors. We currently have both Facebook and Twitter, along with an Issuu page, although the Issuu page is associated with the school. Our social media is mainly used to post articles and to interact with other media outlets. When we have writers live tweet sporting events, we have them do this from their personal accounts and then retweet it on our @realplaywickian account so that we can properly attribute the authorship.
Throughout my career on the Playwickian staff I have worked for the paper to be taken more seriously as a publication. To do this, I have encouraged people of many different view points to write for the paper, specifically in the Opinion section, in order to dispel the belief that the paper was welcoming to those of a liberal mindset only. I succeeded in this by oftentimes asking my personal friends, who were not usual writers for the paper, to write pieces in times when we didn't have any pieces from their side of the political isle. Although this has been difficult, it has slowly brought the publication into a more moderate light.
In addition to this, to make the newspaper seem more professional, I have slowly redesigned our letter head. The changes in our header can be seen in the examples below. The page on the far left is the last issue of the Playiwckian before I joined the staff. The page in the center is the first issue after I joined the staff and redesigned the header. The last page is my final redesign of the header. In between these issues we were, for a time, printing in magazine-style format in which our entire front page was a header, in technicality.
My staff and I are currently working towards creating a phone app for the Playwickian.