The Tiger Hi-Line is Back

After three years' absence from the Cedar Falls public, the Tiger Hi-Line is back!

The school newspaper used to be printed in The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier; we'd give them the stories, art and photos in the student-designed newspaper, and they'd print it for free. It was a wonderful symbiotic relationship until the perfect storm of the 2008 global financial meltdown and tail spin of print news media forced the Courier to drop us after the school year had already started. With the school budgets already set for the year, there was nothing for us to do but struggle to sell ads in that tough economy and try to keep the content and curriculum afloat. We struggled for a time but then folded. For the last three years, the newspaper has existed solely as a photocopied handout distributed among students at the high school. The work is also posted to our website.

Because the web is the wave of the future, we did use the time to greatly enhance our Internet offerings. We wrote a grant and received funding for a brand new broadcast journalism course. The broadcast students also produce a weekly news show as well as individual podcasts on a wide variety of student-interest topics. The website compiles all these efforts at http://journalism.cedar-falls.k12.ia.us/ On this site, we've also archived all of our work from the last three years, so visitors will be able to see how far we've come since the days of the Courier. Past efforts are found under three easy links: READ for the newspaper stories, WATCH for the news show and LISTEN for the podcasts.

Now that Patch is launched, we plan to post daily offerings from the students from all of the publication staffs at the high school. We hope that those who follow this blog will discover the many other individual student creations that we can't possibly fit into this space. The Tiger Hi-Line is printed every Tuesday, the Tiger Hi-Line Online news show is uploaded every Friday, and the student podcasts are uploaded roughly every two weeks on Fridays. All of these staffs take time off for holidays and summer break, but over the course of the school year, we produce around 30 newspapers and 30 news shows. We will try to mix up the offerings on this blog with print and media from all students.

One of the biggest losses that we experienced after the Courier setback was the lack of public feedback. Please let us know what you think about our work. Remember, the works posted here are educational exercises. We are learning by doing. Though we strive for excellence, we may make mistakes, but we have thick skins and are eager to learn from mistakes. Some of the posts will be opinions from individual students, and our staff writers would also welcome replies to offerings that stir you up in the right or wrong ways.

With all the pressure on schools to perform, we are eager to show what we are capable of — especially outside the restrictive realms of standardized testing, but we are sure that you will also learn about the latest developments at Cedar Falls High School. The creative circle is once again complete, and it's sooo good to be back!