The Lion's Roar

Editor explains new journalism program, sees new opportunities

By Emily Breuer

We sat in a circle in the lobby of our Minneapolis hotel until our feet fell asleep and our eyes could barely stay open. As we do every year, on the last night of the National Scholastic Press Association conference that The Roar attends each November, we all spend hours discussing ways to improve our paper. But something about this year was different: instead of just The Roar staff discussing our opinions, members of three publications, The Roar, Denebola and Regulus, attended the conference and had a joint meeting.

Alhough we discussed the usual topics, such as improvements we can make in content and design, the meeting had a different focus: how to revise the journalism program at South.

A few weeks earlier, English department head and assistant adviser to both The Roar and Denebola Brian Baron proposed a plan for the future of journalism at South. Denebola's lack of an official adviser created an immediate short-term problem. Instead of fishing around for temporary solutions and prolonging the problem, though, we decided to not only solve the short-term problem, but to also improve the long-term structure of the journalism program. The devised plan will include the creation of a news magazine that will publish approximately five times a year, a website updated daily and the continuation of only one newspaper.

Reflecting on the way that the South newspapers run, it is clear that our current system is inefficient. We have two monthly newspapers that print the same kinds of art…

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