In the last five years, the Southerner has struggled with earning additional funds to cover training, conventions, and enrichment activities, as well as ensuring diverse source representation in its content. This year and moving forward into the 2025-26 school year, the Southerner is updating internal processes to improve the experience of our readers.
First, the Journalism and Communications Booster Club was launched on April 30 to support the Southerner, the Unmasking, the Orator and Knight View by improving financial support. The booster club will provide our communications programs with additional monetary support and promote collaboration that our programs have not had since Grady’s communications magnet program ended in 2015 (see About the Southerner on our website for more information). The kickoff event marked the beginning of increased community outreach and engagement, with families from all four programs, along with keynote speaker, Grady graduate and former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Maria Saporta.
A key goal of the booster club is to improve the subscription process. Starting next year, all subscriptions will be sold through the booster club’s website instead of School Cash Online, creating a better customer experience and an easier payment process. The booster club hopes to also expedite the newspaper distribution process, provide monetary support for students to participate in conventions and awards circuits and elevate writers with updated technology. For updates, follow @jcommsboosterclub_mhs on Instagram and Facebook.
Another primary goal of the Southerner this school year has been to place an increased emphasis on highlighting the range of perspectives and voices of our school and community. This year, we implemented a three-pronged approach to more representative coverage: tracking the frequency of all sources, creating a mentorship program to get students from different backgrounds involved in journalism and encouraging innovative story pitches. We tracked sources by creating a form that all writers filled out, including pertinent demographic information, which was linked to an automated sheet that put any source highlighted more than three times in one year on a strict no-interview list. This combination has made diversity an integral part of our stories from the beginning of the writing process.
Inclusion will continue to be a cornerstone of the Southerner next year as a new editing role, focused on ensuring accurate representation of our student body in coverage, is being created. This editor will be tasked with editing all stories with a focus on diverse coverage, emphasizing diversity through age, gender, race and political affiliation, while also continuing to provide adequate representation of Midtown’s various academic programs and extracurricular activities.
During a time in which diversity is under threat from the Trump administration, where we have seen unprecedented rollbacks of diversity initiatives, it is more important than ever that the Southerner continues to represent the entire makeup of our school.
The Southerner would like to thank all of its readers for another year of support and looks forward to another year of growth and continued opportunities to provide our readers with the best possible content.
