TAP, TAP, “Hello, anybody there?”

For 108 years, The Maroon and Gray has prospered to inform, educate, and alert the students and faculty of NHS about events that take place in school as well as the surrounding Nutley community. The M&G reporters write articles educating many on the state of what is important and relevant to students. News, features, sports, and opinion articles are just some of what The M&G has to offer to interest students.

However, if you go out and ask the regular NHS student, they’ll express a look of confusion when asked about the newspaper. “I didn’t know that there was a school newspaper,” freshman Sophie Morales said. Many older students aren’t aware of The M&G, too. Senior Journalism student Gianni Costa said, “...I didn’t even know the newspaper existed before my senior year….”

Journalism students reported similar experiences. Senior Journalism II student Kimberly Jerez experienced seeing other students surprised at the newspaper’s existence: “We used to print out the newspaper and, now that it’s online, I feel like not a lot of people know we have a newspaper unless they’re like, looking around the Nutley [Schools] website.” The M&G in its current digital form does not appear to be widely known throughout the student body. 

This is an issue that threatens one main goal that The M&G tries to achieve: to inform and educate students and staff. If students don’t know of our existence, there is a question of how we will ever reach that goal. It also isn’t as though students are uninterested in what we have to offer. When Morales was shown The M&G website she was documented scrolling through the website for an estimated 45 minutes, interested in articles mostly in relevancy, but also older articles of interest, as these were, “interesting in researching the history of the newspaper [and news in general],” Morales said.

Other students also appear to be interested in events in their school community and beyond. The National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) reported that adolescent students are greatly interested in “topics that relate to teens or current events that deal with entertainment and sports” [but] “least interested in foreign news and U.S. politics.” This is what The M&G specializes in that many students are missing out on.

If a student were to go their entire high school career without even hearing about The M&G, it is a question whether or not that student might have wanted to have participated as a reporter of The M&G, but were unaware of its existence, and, therefore, didn’t get the chance. In the Journalism class description, it never specifies that students participate in creating an entire newspaper. Adding that to these descriptions may interest more students in the future, and not in background under the guise of that it, “provides [students] with opportunities to publish in digital and non-digital arenas.” This description is vague, and doesn’t encompass the reality of what the Journalism I and Journalism II classes are about.

The M&G, with the help of the entire school network, should advertise the newspaper more consistently with additional flyers, announcements, and shoutouts during, for example, an assembly and perhaps linking the newspaper to student emails.

The issue is one that can easily be fixed without any sort of difficulty. Raising awareness is easy: announcements and reminders can be sent out to students whether through their email, daily school announcements and better flyers and signs for The M&G.

With greater awareness, and more accurate descriptions for The M&G as well as Journalism in general, students will become more aware of The M&G and therefore interested in it, whether in reading articles from it, writing the articles in it, or simply raising awareness for other students in turn who are interested. This will make our newspaper prosper in the end.