Inside The Newsroom:

The Voyager is a nationally award-winning, student-run newspaper. We operate from room A-2 at Homewood-Flossmoor High School. In order to write for The Voyager, students can either be recommended into the Journalism Seminar course, or take Journalism I, the prerequisite course to the Seminar course. In Journalism I, students learn the fundamentals of journalism: ethics, news writing, editorial writing, and sports writing. Students also learn how to use basic newspaper editing software such as InDesign and Photoshop.

The Voyager staff members start off as writers, and gradually progress after 1 to 2 years to an editorial position. There are six editors on The Voyager. Each section of The Voyager has an editor who assigns stories to the writers in their section, and formats their section’s layout. The section editor is the first to edit their section’s stories. Next, the Managing Editor makes sure each issue has enough Ads for The Voyager to make money to acquire certain benefits for the paper and students on staff. After each section editor is finished editing their section’s stories, they pass the stories onto the Managing Editor for even more editing. The Managing Editor sends the stories to the Editor-In-Chief for editing. The Editor-In-Chief is in charge of the overall operation of the newspaper. Aside from making sure every writer is staying on task, he/she must also thoroughly check every story to ensure there are no grammatical or informational errors. After the stories pass through the editors,
they are then sent to the Faculty Advisor. After all the stories are edited, they are given to the writers for revisions.

Within 2 1/2 weeks following the writing of the stories, the completed issue is sent out to a local printer- Regional Publishing, and then is delivered back to the school in 48 hours. The paper is distributed to over 3,000 people including Homewood-Flossmoor High School students, staff members, and people in the community.

This is our newsroom located in room A-2. There are 24 computers equiped with Adobe PageMaker 6.5 and Adobe Photoshop.

The news section working on stories for the next issue...

...and on the other side of the room, the editorial section works on their stories.

Two of the editors check over a page.

The final stage of editing must go through the Faculty Advisor.

Several staff members read over a recently published issue.

(c) 2005 HOMEWOOD-FLOSSMOOR HIGH SCHOOL