The Mountaineer newspaper has earned three of six badges necessary to be considered a “Distinguished Site,” as rated by the School Newspaper Online (SNO) organization.  The staff’s goal is to achieve this recognition for the third straight year.

The Mountaineer earned its third Audience Engagement Badge from the Scholastic Newspaper Organization(SNO) this February, and both the Site Excellence Badge and the Continuous Coverage Badge this January!

The SHS newspaper achieved the prestigious award of Audience Engagement Badge by meeting a minimum traffic threshold, posting on social media on a daily basis, and maintaining more than 1,000 followers combined on two social media accounts.

The Mountaineer’s Instagram and Twitter accounts boast more than 1,000 followers combined. In addition, over the past couple of months, on a monthly basis, the Mountaineer has received more than 9,000 unique visitors (the number of new people visiting the Mountaineer) and 29,000 page views (the number of people visiting pages/features/posts on the Mountaineer).

To achieve this award, the social media team, has been posting new stories, features, and content on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram on a daily basis.

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The newspaper achieved the Continuous Coverage Badge by publishing four stories per week, each in a different category, for four weeks straight. The staff has also had to write continuous coverage of one event over three stories and three quick coverage stories. Quick coverage stories are written and published within two days of an event taking place.

To obtain the Site Excellence Badge, many of the staff members pulled their brains together to work on making the Mountaineer site as clean, organized, and updated as possible in order to meet SNO’s expectations of obtaining the Site Excellence Badge. To meet SNO’s standards, they fixed featured images, headlines, the organization of different stories and features the Mountaineer has, and much more.

According to the staff’s hopes, they will achieve the final three badges in the next month or two. They are the Multi-media Badge, Best of SNO Badge, and Story Page Excellence Badge. The staff is already very close to earning them.

In order to achieve these badges, the entire staff is putting in as much work as they can each week.

The Story Excellence Badge means detailing, organizing, and designing numerous stories on the school newspaper site to the SNO guidelines. The Best of SNO Badge means obtaining a “Best of SNO” status on at least three recent stories, and the Multi-Media Badge means creating many different videos, podcasts, slideshows, etc. all to SNO’s high standards.