By Blair Smith, Staff Writer
First Flight has been through many changes over the summer: new principal, new assistant principal, new gym floor — and now a new Nighthawk News website.
Over the summer, journalism adviser Steve Hanf attended UNC-Chapel Hill for a teaching fellowship. While there, Hanf learned about coding, digital media and website development using WordPress. His new skills aided him in developing an updated website for the school’s journalism department. Instead of .org, the website now ends in .com.
“I thought it was a great idea to change from .org to .com,” Nighthawk News Editor-in-Chief Mary Pat Thompson said. “In this day and age most websites have URLs that end in .com. Also, we have so many people on our staff this year, so we will be publishing much more content. The .com URL will make it much easier to access our content. I am very excited about that.”
Hanf had a choice to make over the summer: work on making the old website more user friendly, or start from scratch. He chose to start from scratch, and hopes that his hard work on the site will result in fresh new content from the newspaper staff.
“I went and purchased NighthawkNews.com and spent the whole week getting some of our old content on the site. The instruction we got from the UNC professor was incredible, and I’m so grateful to have been selected for the class,” Hanf said. “Our goal is to post very frequently because we have a lot of people in the newspaper class now. The focus is not just on news stories: People can come and be entertained (with) nice features, food columns, movie reviews and photo galleries.”
Online Editor Mack Doebler has had some experience in the technology world. He took Multimedia and Web Design his sophomore year and attended the North Carolina Scholastic Media Institute at UNC-CH this summer, which helped him broaden his skills.
“I thought it was going to be a completely new system, and (that) the stuff I learned was going to be completely null and void, but all the information carries over to .com,” Doebler said.
Many students and people from the community look at the website to catch up on school news and sports, especially if the stories appeal to them. The newspaper staff alerts people to new content by posting links on Facebook and Twitter.
“Students look at the website when we have interesting stories,” Hanf said. “The website has blossomed into a modernized place for students and the community to go and catch up on local news and school news. We want people coming to our website so they can be in the know about everything that’s going on at the school and in the community. ”
Sophomore Blair Smith can be reached at smithas0621@daretolearn.org.
