BV Newsroom Reflects on First Year of Revival

BV has become a hub for multiple media platforms like BVTV, BV Newsflash, and the Yearbook class. But last summer, we felt like something was still missing, and we took on the challenge of reviving our school newspaper. 

Let’s emphasize that word: revival. The BV Newsroom existed for decades, until 2023, when the club that ran it simply did not get established. We are not sure exactly what happened then, but we were proud to take the BV Newsroom name and bring it back to be even better than it was before.

The goal has been simple: to create a platform where we can shine a light on student achievements that is more in depth than what other school-affiliated media platforms can provide. Writing has a special way of capturing student voice and telling stories in descriptive detail, and we felt that a school newspaper would be able to host articles about the stories of students that could engage and inspire readers.

The BV Newsroom during a club meeting in Nov. 2025

We started off by creating a new website to host our articles with the categories of Academic, Club, Athletic, and Performing Arts news. We did our best to make sure that the website embodied the spirit of BV and was easily accessible to anybody. In the beginning, things were definitely shaky, as we rarely were able to get more than 15 viewers on our articles and were not a well-known club on campus.

However, we spent our year continuing to create high-quality media and learning the principles of journalism while also finding ways to garner engagement and interest in our platform. Today, you can find the BV Newsroom embedded into the BV Newsflash newsletter, on Instagram, on QR codes posted in the hallways, and for the first time that we know of: in your hands as a physical magazine-style newspaper. You can find the physical copy, which features our best articles of the year, in your English classes, as well as other high-traffic classrooms.

This physical copy of the newspaper was designed by myself and my friend Cayden, and we have come up with the name The Colt: What’s Under the Shoe? It is meant to showcase what the BV Newsroom has been working on all year with its best articles of the year and as a set-up for future digital and physical issues of the paper. We hope you enjoy and you check out more of our articles on our site!

We'd like to thank everyone who was involved in the process of the revival of this newspaper! Ms. Smith has been very supportive of us from the very start and let us use her classroom throughout the school year! Mr. LaMarr used his experience at the Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Chronicle in order to give pointers on how to be great journalists and use a consistent format. Mr. Moore and Mrs. Budenbender helped us make this whole thing official. Ms. King stepped in mid-way through the school year to proofread and give feedback on all of our articles. Ms. Mahlke assisted us with the actual printing process at the end of the school year.

We'd also like to thank everyone who was willing to put themselves out there and write an article for our newspaper this year, as well as everybody who consented to being interviewed. They are the reason that we were able to share so many stories this year.

And of course, we'd like to thank you, the readers! You are the reason we do this, and we hope you have found some joy reading student-written articles about student stories. You can count on us being back next year with more articles, higher quality, and hopefully, more printed copies!