Dear Editors,
"I'm currently a high school student who's now the managing editor for my school's newspaper club! We've had some highs and lows in our production, and I was wondering what are some resources for us to improve our newspaper and understand our audience better?"
About Me
My name is Daisey Yu, and I’m a University of Michigan sophomore ('24) currently in the School of Literature, Science, and Arts planning to major in Public Health Sciences and minor in Writing.
Before high school, I struggled a lot with writing and my English classes. Later on, my high school English teachers changed my mindset about writing and fostered an environment that helped me improve and experiment with my writing style. The most significant development in my high school writing career was joining my high school's newspaper club. In the depths of the Crane Clarion production room, I learned from various faculty and classmates how to interview, write, and edit articles. While the learning curve was steep, I enjoyed absorbing new information and applying it to the next article. In my senior year, I became a senior editor for the student life section of the newspaper. I wanted to share my educational and fun experiences with the up-and-coming staff writers.
In college, I wanted to continue developing my foundational writing skills. My first-year writing class Classical Civilizations 101 was the stepping stone to applying to and joining the Writing in Minor program. One of our final projects in the Minor is to develop a portfolio that experiments with a previously written piece.
As a person interested in both STEM and humanities, I decided to use my senior AP Statistics report and communicate it to high school newspaper editors for my project. I hope to apply my scientific communication skills I learned from this project to my academic career, profession, and beyond.
Project
I chose to experiment with my AP Statistics Report to improve my scientific communication skills through multimedia forms. The paper is formatted like a report with an introduction, purpose, methods, data, discussion, and conclusion section. As editors of our school newspaper, my friend and I wanted to investigate if people read the Crane Clarion and, if so, why they read it and what sections they read. We also wanted to know why people don’t read the Crane Clarion, so we can address those concerns in the future.
Based on my experience as a Crane Clarion editor, it is very important for us to understand our readers and cater to their interests. We want to spend our time doing meaningful work and producing stories that students, parents, faculty, and alumni would like.
This project walks through how my friend and I were able to build a survey and sample a portion of our school. Instead of throwing around AP Statistics jargon, I define and explain how and why we did things the way we did for a general audience.
Purpose
The purpose of this experiment is for editors (the audience of this experiment) of all types of newspapers to be able to survey their readers and improve their paper from feedback in a methodical and mixed-methods fashion.
Beyond describing the experiment I actually did, I hope that readers can learn some new statistical tools to aid their own research and studies.
Your Experience
What I hope this project can offer is a way to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate how many people read the newspaper and what sections they prefer to read. As you navigate through this project, try and create your own study using some of the techniques and analysis briefly described in the project tab. The goal isn’t to create a “one way fits” procedure but to provide an outline of a possible study one can conduct.
Forum
After reading through the project, please feel free to add any suggestions and/or your own experience surveying your school for feedback. I hope that we can build a forum full of recommendations, experiences, and ideas to further improve this project.
My Own Learning Experience Throughout This Project
Taking what I wrote before and changing the genre of my writing has been a learning experience for me as well. I refreshed myself on statistics and also challenged myself to practice communicating quantitative information clearly and concisely.
First, I learned that any platform has its pros and cons.
I initially used a Wix website to create my project. Since the main purpose of this project was to break down statistics to a general audience, I decided to focus on the sampling section and how my friend and I were able to create our survey. However, I ended up focusing so much on the survey section that I wasn’t able to convey the meaning of the whole paper.
So, I turned to Infogram, which is a website that specializes in infographic designs. This time, I modeled the infographic after my paper and focused on visuals and getting the whole project across to my audience. However, the infogram didn’t have as many interactive features which I hoped I could use to keep the audience engaged and interested in statistics.
Ultimately, I decided to combine my infographic with Wix. I made my website simpler than my first experiment, and I included all the info from the infographic into a separate page on my website.
Secondly, this project showed how difficult it was to translate quantitative data into writing. Even after many drafts, it’s still difficult to fully break down the statistics for easy understanding. I had to imagine myself in the shoes of someone who hasn’t had statistical experience.
I view this project as a start to more future work on scientific communication.
