You might think we are mad. Backwards. Out of touch.
I mean, why—given the stranglehold of smartphones, the ascension of AI—would a school newspaper return to printing ink on paper? Shouldn’t we be beaming live into your microchipped brain an endless listicle of top 10 reasons why ChatGPT should summarize all articles on The Bite in an endless scroll behind your eyeball fluid? Well, maybe. If we could. But I’m sure there would be some attention-destroying feature that would distract you away from even that level of engagement. However, there is no denying the physical object of a magazine in your hands. Its combination of words, imagery, and people you might even know personally seduces in a way no other media can or will. In a way, we believe a print magazine is a fun way to go back to the future.
“[Print magazines are] both permanent and disposable – something that will sit on a shelf and potentially last forever, but which can also be dropped into the recycling bin without too many guilty feelings.”
—Steve Watson in the March 2022 issue of STACK
On Wedesday, Dec. 18, during the first block of the day, The Bite delivered a magazine to each and every Secondary student in an event known as Drop Everything and Read the Bite. Classes throughout Secondary dropped their lesson plans for the day and devoted time to reading and reacting to the Bite magazine. Finally, many of them completed a survey that will become invaluable feedback for future issues of the magazine.
While The Bite actually produced two (thinner!) print magazines more than five years ago, the idea for this 40-page glossy magazine originated with my Journalism 9 students in Fall 2022. They shocked me when they said they would actually read The Bite if it were printed as a newspaper. So, to those current grade 11s: prove yourselves prophets and read the magazine, cover to cover, and then drop a comment down below.
Another reason came from the Journalism 10 class itself, which for several years coasted along with mostly just a wink and a nod to the world of the IB standards. This year, my first taking on this course, I was tasked with making it fit the MYP Design rubric with the spirit of the Design Cycle. In the past, students selected a job description and often made their own rubrics and graded themselves. I’m sure it was fun; there’s no doubt it was engaging; I’m sure some work got done; it definitely wasn’t kosher with the IB. Deadlines (I hear) came and went with a shrug. Articles dragged on for far longer word counts than they deserved.
So I thought: Let’s bring back a print product, because in this case there is a real-world deadline, one that real journalists live and breathe by: the date the magazine gets sent to the printers. There are no extensions granted when the ink is already drying on the printing press. Too, space is limited, and so the reader’s time is measured out, word by word, page by page.
Another urgency came from our content-filled website feeling like a ghost town. Long-form feature articles—months of hard toil!—would drop on our website to the sound of crickets. We were lucky to get one or two comments from a fellow Journalism student or the writer’s long-lost uncle in Bermuda. (Or—long story—that grade 5 class from the U.S. that was assigned to read and comment on a Bite article about slime.) Our readers come from all corners of the globe, but that’s not the point. Our readers should be you: Secondary students at AISB. This is written by you, for you. So here it is. (Well, not literally “here” on the website, but here is the digital version for our worldwide readership.)
A good number of the content pieces in the magazine will end up on our website with dedicated permalinks in order to reach those fans of ours across the world (and help our writers build their digital footprints). Imagine your English essay or your Science lab published in such a public venue and you can imagine the thrill and anxiety of Journalism class: No other class makes student work so visible to such a broad audience.
You can help us make the spring issue even better by filling in the surveys, leaving feedback, or possibly writing an old-fashioned comment on the web. Magazines are two-way streets. Tell us what you liked; tell us what stunk. With 14 girls and 1 boy on our staff of grade 10s, we know we have some blind spots. Suggest story ideas so we can make this magazine (and The Bite as a whole) a better, more representative platform for student voices.
