Data collected by a staffer suggests that our Portsmouth High School student-run newspaper, “The PaperClip,” may not be read as much as we thought it would.
A survey conducted by myself, a PHS junior, journalist, and current stats student, indicates that approximately half of the students sampled by me were aware of our paper’s existence. (This data suffered from convenience sampling and other missteps — more information is located in italics at the bottom of our article). A few interviews help explain what we should be working on for next time.
When asked about our website, Ryen Harrison, a sophomore at PHS, said “I didn’t know about it.”
This isn’t an uncommon theme. Of the data collected, only about half of the students surveyed even knew we existed. While we’ve been working on marketing, there are, admittedly, some shortcomings with our community outreach.
A common theme in suggestions for our paper was an increased focus on sports. We’re pushing out a significant amount of sports-themed articles for our edition today, but we’re still looking for feedback for our next round. In particular, many students wanted to see more scores of sports.
In line with what SS Clippers does, Kendall Ford, a sophomore at PHS, wanted to see The PaperClip do a version of Question of the Week.
General announcements were also a common theme. Aidan Chin, a sophomore at PHS, said they wanted to see information about “schedule changes” on our website.
Elaborating on previous statements, Josh Cole, a sophomore at PHS, said they wanted to see information about “certain assemblies” on the paper as well. While announcements haven’t been a feature in our newspaper, it would fit in-line with our mission statement.
There are plenty of ways we could improve our paper. Feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated and helps us figure out what stories we should cover for our next edition.
Data was collected in random classrooms during FLEX on January 17, 2023. Three math classes, a science class, an English class, and two general hangout locations were sampled. Of an N-size of 53, 28 knew about our paper and 25 didn’t. An attempt at ensuring independence was made. Response bias based on peer responses may have affected these results — however, the researcher believes this would mainly falsely increase the number of people who reported they knew about our paper. Undercoverage bias of students focused on CTE & foreign language departments may be present. Convenience sampling was also used due to time constraints and may have caused further undercoverage bias. The data collected is not definitive, is biased, and a full conclusion cannot be determined with the information presented. A full, properly conducted study that addresses these issues may be performed based on the reception of this article.
