Note: This year, I decided to elevate my publication’s student media on social media. I was promoted to the Director of Digital Media by my adviser at the beginning of the year and never looked back from then on. From Facebook to Twitter and Instagram, I believed that we needed to step up our online coverage, especially in the increasing need for news now. I provided the students with coverage on important upcoming events at our school and news that they needed to hear. But the biggest step that I made for our media and our community, is covering our local sporting events. I teamed up with our community paper, The Brighton Blade, this fall to bring coverage of every football game, which was extremely important due to the fact the team played a heavy road schedule which included teams from Colorado Springs, Loveland, and Fort Collins, places where students struggled to travel. Even after the conclusion of the football season, I provided coverage of our softball team competing at state and the following winter sports. After each game I covered, I post a photo recap with my best photos from the night, which has caught the attention of many parents in the community and even faces who follow us around the nation. All content posted on the BHS Reflections Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook was posted by me.
BRIGHTON COMPLETES THE COMEBACK AGAINST FORT COLLINS
Note: On September 29th, I traveled over an hour to French Field at Rocky Mountain High School to cover our football team taking on Fort Collins High School. Because of the long drive, not many of our student body or even families of athletes were able to travel to Fort Collins. They missed a good one.
Our team fell behind early 21-0 but was able to scratch a touchdown before halftime. I tweeted some of the photos I took at halftime, so people who couldn’t attend could get the feel of how the game was going. I even tweeted a gif of Pam Halpert from “The Office” declaring that we were all excited for a comeback. Through the few highs of the first half and the many lows, I was informing my community of what was happening.
As the second half came around, and excitement grew on the sidelines and in the crowd, my tweets picked up. After our running back, Jes Ramirez put in three touchdowns in the second half to give us the lead, the tweets were firing on all cylinders. The game was one of the greatest comebacks in our football programs long history. Within the span of two hours, or team had come together to complete the comeback. I felt social media was very important to this because my job as a journalist was to keep our community informed as these crazy events happened. Check out a slideshow of my best tweets from that night below:
BHS POMS AND CHEER TEAM MAKE IT
TO STATE
Note: Before our cheer and POMS team competed at the 2017 CHSAA 5A State competition, I created these infographics to post on our social media to inform our followers of the upcoming competition. The infographic used two of my photos throughout the year and even gave a sneak peek of our upcoming yearbook theme to the students.
Note: As my reach on social media grew larger, I began to receive more attention for my pictures, especially from the parents of athletes. After posting photos from the teams most recent game, parents of players responded with comments, showing their appreciation for our growing presence on social media. The post reached almost 1,200 people and displayed our school, our football program, and our publication positively for many eyes to see.
Will Satler 