What exciting or interesting events have been happening at your school recently? Young Post wants to share them. If you would like to be featured in our “Happenings” page on Mondays, please send 250 to 300 words describing the event and what was unique about it to [email protected]. The piece should be written by a school representative (this can also be a student). Please also provide us with photographs so that we can see for ourselves what you’ve been up to.
How to file a good School Happening:
1. Pictures:
All pics or logos should be in jpg format and attached to your email, not part of the word document.
Select only 1 or two pictures.
Group pictures of the whole class are not a good choice because no one will be recognisable at the small size, so where possible they will not be selected to run.
Please identify who is in the picture (from left to right) and what they are doing.
e.g. Form 4 Home Economics students (from left: John Tsang and Jilly Chow) whip up a pancake for Shrove Tuesday events.
As we are a newspaper for teenagers, we prefer pictures of teenagers to adults.
The pics should be high resolution.
We also need your school logo.
Send your pictures and logo to [email protected] with your school name in the subject field.
2. Text:
Start with your name and contact number so if we have any queries we can reach you immediately. Put it in the Word document, as copy gets separated from email addresses in our system. Don’t use any fancy text mark-ups, such as bold and italics, underline or boxes. They are not compatible with our system.
Put the writer’s name on the article
Add the school name as you wish it to appear in print:
English teacher: George Harrod, Shatin Senior Secondary School, phone 2696 3652
Piece written by: Amy Fu Li, Form 4A
Shatin Senior Secondary School
Email headings will not be included in your story when it is transferred to our content management system, so all information pertaining to the story should be in the body of the email.
Start by telling us what the event was, when it occurred, why it was held, who attended.
Try not to list items of the event, they take up unnecessary space and will be cut out of the article. Choose one highlight and focus on it.
Try not to fall into the PR-speak that wastes space, time and interest. All schools believe that they give “all-rounded education”, all schools want to “broaden their students’ horizons” etc. All guest speakers tell the kids to work hard and never give up. Try to find something that is different.
Please don’t allow students to write “personal” accounts of their feelings about the day. This is not news reporting. Students often write along the lines of “I thought I was going to be bored, but then I had fun” angle and it has become stale. Those pieces are best saved for a personal journal or diary..
If you have competitions like sports days, tell us who won, and whether or not any records were broken. That is news!
The space allocated for regular school happenings is very limited to make them more interesting for the readers.
But, if your school does something amazing – like building an airplane in class, or holding a fashion show of their own designs, or a battle of the bands, or the teachers played students at basketball while Stephen Curry refereed, we may want to know more! In such cases, we will reply to your email and arrange a time to speak to you.