OHS Magnet receives national recognition

Owatonna High School’s newspaper, The Magnet, is one of 14 newspapers in the nation to be recognized as a Distinguished Site out of the 1,656 schools that use School Newspapers Online (SNO). 
SNO is a company that was created to make journalism advisers’ lives easier by making WordPress websites for scholastic and collegiate journalism programs and gives them tips along the way. 
The Distinguished Sites program recognizes those sites that meet all of the standards in each of the six core areas including continuous coverage, site excellence, story page excellence, excellence in writing, multimedia and audience engagement.  After each of the standards are met in one area, the site is awarded a badge. 
Last year the program had 67 sites achieve nearly 150 badges with seven programs earning Distinguished Sites. This year 128 publications applied for 396 badges. 
“Owatonna was one of the only two Minnesota schools to get it. Another impressive element of Owatonna’s achievement is that they earned five out of six badges on their first attempt…that is rare!” said SNO Distinguished Sites Committee Chair Kari Koshiol. 
Jessica Wagner says The Magnet has been using SNO since she took over as adviser two years ago. Along the way she says they have helped them out with the technical aspects behind the website, tutorials and great customer service. 
Although the publication earned the engagement badge last year, this is the first time they have accomplished all six badges. 
“It is a great way to up our ante. Basically they say this is what good journalism is and it gave kids a place to say I belong in this world. It has just upped our level of ability in things we are doing,” Wagner said about applying to be a Distinguished Site. 
In order to apply for the program Wagner and the students looked at each of the standards that had to be met in each category and figured out which ones they were not currently meeting and how they could fix it.
When Wagner found out The Magnet was a distinguished site she felt pride.
“I am just so proud of my kids. They have worked really hard and not just to jump through these hoops, but to raise the ante,” she said. 
“They bring awareness and are actually the voice of Owatonna High School. They tackle what kids care about in our building.” 
Wagner hopes with this recognition, comes more opportunities for the students. 
“The real reason I am on board with this is I am hoping that it provides scholarship opportunities to kids, as many of them are planning on going to college,” Wagner said. 
“I want to give them the most opportunities I possibly can. With a nationally recognized program, this should open some doors or at least be a resume builder for them.” 
Senior Tim Flynn has been involved with The Magnet for one semester and played a role in achieving the story page excellence and continuous coverage badges. 
“It is good knowing that we have one goal. A lot of times in Magnet it is hard for me to really look toward something to do if it is not a story so it was just something to reach and a way to really recognize ourselves for what we’ve been doing,” Flynn said. 
“Since we can’t win championships or something in sports, this is one way for high school newspapers to show how well they are doing.” 
Flynn said the two most challenging badges to accomplish were the continuous coverage and multimedia badges. 
“It was very challenging. We had to get in so many stories per week and getting everyone on staff to get to those deadlines was tough and sometimes fell through,” he said. 
Flynn even had to pick up the slack a couple times and write more stories for others that weren’t going to happen. 
“I was proud that we could band together. It seems like we are really chaotic but we had one goal and finally came together to get that,” he said. 
Junior Ava Stockwell has been involved with The Magnet for two years and played a role in achieving the story page excellence and excellence in writing badges. 
“We have had a lot of rough patches this year with staff members and getting stuff in on time, but in order to become a Distinguished Site we had to come together and people had to get their stuff done,” Stockwell said. “Being recognized just makes me so proud of our staff, that we actually did it and followed through.” 
Stockwell says the overall process was difficult because they had to constantly rely on getting individual stuff in on time and keep good communication between everyone to make sure they were all on the same page. 
“I really hope having this recognition gives us more support from the community as well as the school and we will get bigger because of it,” she said. “It makes us like top dogs in the United States, so that is pretty cool. Most of the schools who are a Distinguished Site have a staff of 50 to 60 people and we don’t even have 30 people on staff.” 
Senior Karter Kubista has been involved with The Magnet for two years and played a major role in the site design badge, as he oversees the website. 
The main challenge he faced was keeping the website new and fresh by constantly changing things such as the theme, the background and the header. 
“I’ve been pushing everyone to make a better website and we’ve worked really hard on different backgrounds, headers… it is just crazy to think that we actually did this,” Kubista said. “It means everything to us. Now we are a nationally ranked site. Just seeing it progress over the years… when we first started our website was a train wreck and now it is really good.”