Newspaper Promotion and Distribution

This is another blog about my reporter teacher. Disclaimer: All opinions expressed about this teacher are solely my own.

One of the worst things about her class was that she wanted us to pass out copies of the school newspaper.

I did not want to do this for a number of reasons: I was not working for the school newspaper, I was not getting paid to do this, and it just seems silly to hand out a school newspaper to some random person.

She wanted us to hand them out because according to her communications students are out going. Ok…-_- Not me!

She also went overboard with it. She wanted each person to pass out 5 copies of the school newspaper. When the class started there was like 30-40 people in there. That is like; let’s see. I’ll just use 30 to make it simple 5x30=150. 150?! I never really thought about it now until I crunched the numbers. So in her mind about 150 newspapers would have been distributed in an ideal world.

It was funny because every time a new issue would come out and she would hand out her 5 per person at the end of class the room was littered with newspapers. I remember one time some of the students were having a conversation about what they do with the extra papers. One girl said that she kept the papers in her car. Another person said that they put the papers back in the boxes. I use to just leave them in the basket under the desk.

She wanted us to pass them out to everybody. Her thought was since the newspaper is from a community college the whole community reads it and not just students. I remember her telling us to give the newspapers to our parents and siblings who did not attend the school, and tell them to write a letter to the editor. She really wanted anybody to write a letter to the editor. I mean every time a new issue would come out she would write the address to the editor (I think snail and email) on the board.

The story she told the class was that they didn’t pay the people who painted the boxes. They were not allowed to put the news papers in those boxes. That’s why we had to pass them out.

The strange thing was that when we covered the chapter about journalism in the book she did not try to promote the school newspaper. That puzzled me.

She was also very concerned about a conference for students who worked on the school newspaper. It took place during spring break, and the people who went had to go with her… In the weeks leading up to the conference she would tell the class about projects that they could submit if you were not part of the newspaper staff. She would talk about this conference for the bulk of the class time. For her being a reporter/teacher she did not know how to manage her time very well in class. She even spent the bulk of a class session talking about the website for that conference, and pulled it up as the class was taking a test. It distracted me because the website was so loud. She even signed up some people from my class for an activity without their consent. She handed out a clipping about that conference to the whole class. (she liked handing out clippings in general) When I returned from break back to her class (which I was dreading to go to because I knew she would just talk incessantly about that conference) there was a sign that the teacher posted on the door of her classroom congratulating the people who went, and she decorated it with stickers. She said that the website for the school newspaper won an award. She said it won because she drove us to it; I’d say more like held hostage.

The newspaper came out every two weeks, so after a while I started calculating every two weeks, and I would be conveniently absent on those days. It usually worked.

She wanted to recruit students to work for the school newspaper, so badly she promoted the summer classes she was teaching. She also wanted students to recruit students to the school.

Towards the end of the year one week she came to class, but she didn’t have that many newspapers with her. She ended up giving one per person. Usually when people in class received the papers they would start reading them. This time I didn’t even notice I received a copy because I was too busy doodling a picture of a Care Bear. Somebody (not me) pointed out to the teacher that a caption was wrong on a picture. The funny thing was this was on the front page. Most of the class thought the wrong caption was funny. The teacher was so embarrassed, and said she couldn’t help the newspaper staffers. I was skeptical about this because of her controlling personality.

It was funny because one time when I was at school. I think I was already out of her class by then I saw her with a dolly full of stacks of school newspapers There was a box of school newspapers, and it was pretty full. Then she takes a big stack of papers off her dolly and crams them into the box. This was a hilarious sight.

She was just too self promoting. Maybe that’s why I’m so turned off on self promotion.

Recently I found out through a little research that she made an invalid contract with the painter of the newspaper storage boxes. She went over somebody’s head. Somebody in her position was not allowed to make contracts. This is why she had the class distribute newspapers.