About Us

Redefining High School
Journalism

Wayland Student Press Network (WSPN) is the online student media network of Wayland High School. Its five main divisions spotlight student journalism through news articles, commentaries, videos, photo galleries, magazine posts, and blog posts. Content of WSPN has always been published first and exclusively on the Web, focusing on visual communication and interaction with the viewers.

Founded in 2007 with the purpose of raising awareness of school activities and connecting different parts of the community in a central location, WSPN has reached its initial goals and is continuing to serve the Wayland High School community as a binding force.

Wayland Student Press, part of WSPN, is the winner of a National Pacemaker Award, which is given to top high school and college publications in the nation. After winning the award in its first year, WSPN has continued to garner attention from various media specialists and attain awards from different press associations.

Due to its success, WSPN has been able to bring a new journalism course to Wayland High School for the year 2008-2009. Currently, WSPN staff members include journalism students as well as many others from the school community who serve as the leading force of an open, student-run media organization. As of March 2009, sixty percent of the staff consists of students outside of the journalism class.

WSPN uses innovative and unconventional ways to maximize its presence in the high school community. Its website serves as the homepage of all computers on campus, and WSPN has installed a 52″ display in the Commons area for public viewing of its site. Any student can navigate through the network website using a computer kiosk connected to the display.

We also embrace the power of humor, the popularity of multimedia content, and the effectiveness of Web tools (e.g. weekly e-mail newsletter, Twitter) to make a lasting impact among the students and beyond, reaching countless parents, teachers, administrators, and other visitors.

Staff members of WSPN update the website every day, resulting in more than 2,000 pageviews from the Wayland community each school day. In addition to these visits, WSPN gets many more hits from across the nation and around the world.

WSPN uses Wordpress, an open source publishing application, as its website’s content management system. We do not use any templates made by others; every aspect of WSPN originates with the students.

Wayland High School is a public school with approximately 900 students, located in Wayland, Massachusetts, about 30 minutes from Boston.

2009 & WSPN
Preparing for the Web Generation

In 2009, major print publications are collapsing and online media are thriving. Many conventional newspapers are struggling to present their content in a way that Internet viewers embrace. In contrast, Wayland Student Press Network (WSPN), a new Web-based high school publication, is preparing for the next generation of students who were born when the Internet was already a household word.

While taking advantage of today’s Web 2.0 technologies, we are regarding multimedia content as important as textual content, along with using humor and human interest connection to appeal to a broader range of students. One of our goals is to encourage other high school newspapers to be Web-based, dynamic and interactive, producing Web-friendly content such as short video clips, photo slideshows, blog posts, news snippets, and much more.

WSPN is an award-winning online high school publication that uploads diverse types of content first and only on the Web. Please explore our online network to see how we intend to popularize the medium with the Web generation.