As the school year is coming to a close, so is the Wahawk Insider’s inaugural year. For a first year news team, a lot has been accomplished. Rounding off the year with a total word count of 63,561 over a span of 173 published pieces, the Wahawk Insider has become a SNO distinguished site as well as an IHSPA news team finalist.

Revisiting the 173 published works, they can be split up into separate groups. In the news category, there were 32 total articles. Sports had 45, arts and entertainment had 19, opinion had 16, features had 56 and multimedia had 18. However,  36 of those articles were in multiple categories while another 30 were marked as uncategorized. Taking this into account, the Wahawk Insider is ending the year with 173 total publications, 143 being categorized, four being podcasts and nine being videos.

Adding to the total count list, the Wahawk Insider, along with the yearbook staff, took a whopping 98,546 pictures over the course of the year.

Expanding on our awards, as mentioned, the Wahawk Insider is a SNO distinguished site and an IHSPA news team finalist. Being a SNO distinguished site means that we have earned all of our badges; best of SNO, audience engagement, multimedia, story page excellence, continuous coverage and site excellence. While it was not always the easiest, we were able to accomplish each of the badges in our first year.

As for our standing as a news team finalist, we hit our goal as well. Upon hearing about it, we wanted to aim for a finalist position which sounded rather difficult. The Iowa High School Press Association, a group that judges all of the high school publications in Iowa based on skill, provided the opportunity to compete with other schools in order to be a news team finalist. The Wahawk Insider, though we were pitted against schools with larger news teams, came in fourth place for class C, labeling us as a news team finalist.

With a total of 15 staff members throughout the year, 10 during the first semester and 11 during the second, the Wahawk Insider proved to be a small but mighty group. After learning the ropes, the Wahawk Insider is aiming for even more success for the upcoming years.