Recently deemed the “enemy of the American people,” reporters are facing an increase in scrutiny of their credibility and integrity. As high school journalists, we feel included in this heightened disdain toward the press.
Harry Styles said it best: “Just stop your crying. It’s a sign of the times.” This has been a rough year for journalists, but that doesn’t discourage us.
On The Chronicle, our priority is to impartially report the truth.
We hope to continue serving the school community by helping to facilitate transparency between the administration and the student body. Journalism is essential to hold institutions accountable, and we don’t take this responsibility lightly.
As a staff, we intend to continue The Chronicle’s longstanding tradition of strong and accurate reporting.
Since Harvard and Westlake merged, the Editors-in-Chief of the Chronicle have typically been a boy and a girl. For the second time in Harvard-Westlake history, two girls were chosen to assume this role this year. This change is one of many that we anticipate for the paper in the upcoming school year.
As part our efforts to gear the newspaper toward our high school audience, we will be focusing more on digital media.
The digital managing editors, along with the multimedia editor, will be working to regularly produce innovative online content that will both correspond with print stories and stand on its own.
We plan on making Quad Talks to complement all eight of our print issues.
The video highlighting our year-long goals, which can be found on the Chronicle’s Facebook page, kickstarts this initiative.
Another one of our ambitions is to burst the infamous Harvard-Westlake bubble. In the past, we’ve restricted the majority of our stories to covering on-campus changes and events.
While our focus still remains on reporting news affecting the school community, we want to acknowledge that students are not solely impacted by what goes on around campus. This issue’s story on the recent events in Charlottesville put students in a national context.
In today’s heated political climate, not discussing current events in the context of our student body would be negligent.
The administration hired a permanent Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, exemplifying their efforts to facilitate important discussions.
We want to make our own.
