For the first time in nearly 17 years, Battle Ground High School has a student newspaper. The Tiger Times was relaunched by language arts teacher Ryan Karraker.
“I actually worked at The Columbian,” Karraker jokes, “not as a reporter but as a glorified paperboy.”
Karraker did spend several years working for The VanCougar, a campus newspaper for Washington State University. He then taught journalism for six years at Amboy Middle School before coming over to BGHS.
“I think it’s really important to give students a voice at school, so I am glad that we have a student newspaper back up and running,” Karraker said in the first issue of The Tiger Times announcing the relaunch. “We are going to be learning as we go, but I would much rather have students learn from doing rather than just reading about how to do journalism from a textbook.”
“One of their assignments each week is, they have to read the newspaper and pull out essential information,” Karraker said. “Just by doing that, hopefully they’re —subconsciously at least— learning about how journalism works.”
Each edition of The Tiger Times includes news about events happening in and around the school, student and staff spotlights, sports updates and even puzzles such as crosswords and word search. There are also heavier topics, such as vandalism impacting boys’ restrooms, concerns over student parking and changes to flex time on Tuesdays and Thursdays for students with a passing grade.
In this first year of the paper, the class has around 18 students. None have previous experience writing news content, but junior Maddy Alexander said she’s enjoying the learning process.
“I really enjoy the interviewing aspect,” said Alexander. “Some of the conversations you have with people, to me it’s really interesting.”
But that can also be the most challenging aspect of the process of putting an issue together. “We’ve been working on how to talk to people, ways of really drawing information out of them,” Karraker said. “Which, as they’ve learned, is often not very easy.”
“The people who aren’t as good at answering can be hard, because you have to ask them even more questions in order to get enough to write about,” said senior Sara Moore. “But I think even that helps, because it teaches you how to come up with the right kind of questions.”
In an upcoming issue, Karraker and the students will be surveying seniors who will be eligible to vote in November, getting their thoughts on the 2024 presidential election. That assignment sparked conversations around how to ask non-leading questions, how to accurately represent survey data and how to cover a controversial topic without letting bias creep in.
“We’re also teaching a lot about being inquisitive, having good follow-up questions,” said Karraker. “If you can get people talking about something they’re interested in, you might get some gold.”
While neither Alexander or Moore said they’re planning a career in journalism, both said they hope to gain life skills through the class.
“I really like to interrupt people,” Alexander admitted, “so interviewing people is helping me learn how to listen and get better about not talking over someone.”