The results are in! After sending out a survey to every student at IHS a few weeks ago, the Tattler Editorial Board has worked tirelessly to read through the data and internalize all of your suggestions—including those to try to “be cool” and to start “roast[ing] the football team.” We were also told to have a completely uncensored version, which unfortunately will not be possible because CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED, not to mention CENSORED CENSORED, which The Tattler is in no way responsible for.
First, let’s look at the hard numbers. In total, we received 256 responses from 1351 surveys we sent out, which represents a response rate of 19 percent. Keep in mind the people who responded were probably more likely to have read The Tattler than those who did not. We’ll start off by looking at readership rates.
We can see from the first graph that the vast majority of our respondents do read The Tattler. Students seem to be split between “yes” and “occasionally” (those who only read specific articles of interest or don’t have much time to read). Our third graph helps break down how often students picked issues up last year. Meanwhile, around two-thirds of respondents read the September Issue. That’s no small amount, but it’s clear that we could be reaching out to an even larger portion of the school. We also received a few comments claiming that it was difficult to find issues. Look for them in front of classroom entrances around the start of each month, preferably before others can take the entire pile.
We’ve confirmed that people know what The Tattler actually is, so let’s examine how well The Tattler is doing at letting people know about us.
Thankfully, most of you were aware that anyone can write for The Tattler. For those of you who didn’t know, if you want to contribute, just come to any of the Writers’ Meetings, which are open to all students at IHS. You can also email editor@ihstattler.com to get updates on when meetings will happen and to sign up to write articles digitally. Speaking of digital communication, The Tattler is in fact available online! Our website is www.ihstattler.com, and we highly recommend it. Not only is it very well designed graphically speaking, but it also has a comment section for each article and a search feature that lets you find all of your favorite articles and authors. However, we know we don’t have to sell you on the idea: more than half of our respondents would be moderately or very interested in reading The Tattler online. The website is mobile-friendly, too.
We also found that the lack of awareness is leading to a pool of untapped talent; nearly half of the people who didn’t know they could contribute would be willing to do so. If one of those people is you, start writing; we’ll accept your submissions with open arms.
Finally, let’s examine the opinions of respondents with respect to The Tattler and student journalism in general.
It is concerning that the vast majority of those who don’t read The Tattler simply find it unimportant. Out of the three possible choices, this is the hardest to remedy.
As a still-growing section, Literary was left out for this question. Opinion, perhaps unsurprisingly, takes the lead in popularity, while Features, Backpage, and News lag behind by just a bit. Arts section falls by little bit more, but it’s the Sports section that takes last place. Some respondents did point out the lack of IHS sports in the paper. We’ll be making an effort to improve that in the future.
We also asked students what they thought about various aspects of The Tattler on a scale of one to five. Students generally agreed that The Tattler is high-quality and in-depth, and that it covers a wide scope of topics that students find both interesting and engaging. Student authors were found to be well-informed and clear (each of these had an average rating of four out of five). Students also generally agreed that articles were not out of date (rating on average only two out of five for The Tattler being out of date), and that the paper was well-designed and easy to find—the responses to these had a median value of four and five respectively. However, many respondents felt The Tattler should be more objective, with more than half of all respondents giving three out of five or higher in agreement with the statement “The Tattler does a poor job of remaining objective and covering both sides of an issue.”
Finally, we received a plethora of comments to read through. Some were short and to the point, others long and thoughtful. To conclude our analysis, though, here’s a compilation of some of our favorite extraneous comments in response to what The Tattler should do to improve:
- “Get rid of it”
- “Control Jacob Silcoff”
- “Less Jacob Silcoff PLEASE!!!!!!”
- “get rid of that wierd [sic] guy”
- “less of Jacob Silcoff being up in arms about stuff (it’s getting a stale)”
- “Removing James Park from staff.” (Features Editor’s note: I know who you are.)
- “Racist” (just the word “Racist”)
- “Memes”
- “Not sending out surveys with questions that are basically the same”
We love you too, IHS.