This is the 3,000th post on Timber Creek Talon. Let’s tell you why that’s important.
I started at Timber Creek High School in the 2014-2015 school year.
Technically, Timber Creek Talon was online in August of 2014, but, in my opinion, the actual start of the program was Feb. 1, 2015 after TCHS Administration and counseling approved a mid-year class of Newspaper to form. Those O.G. Talons literally taped flyers to the wall to get people to notice our fledging paper. We were small, we were scrappy, and we worked fast. There were 17 of those O.G. Talons (including myself) working on anything from announcement posts to “Why is Timber Creek a Closed Campus?” and more.
By the next year, we’d evolved to be the official Twitter and Facebook accounts for the school. Our work got noticed more. We won some awards in UIL and started the Broadcast program. All the while, we were producing more and more content. Our cross-media work with Shattered Dreams nearly broke the site (but did break our traffic records). We grew to a larger staff with more diversity.
And we grew even more. We hit 1,000 posts in May of 2016. We hit 1 million page views in 2017. A story went viral in 2018. We’re now at over 2.3 million page views in the lifetime of Talon. We’ve tackled tough topics. We’ve explained complex district decisions. We had to remind people of what we do and why we do it.
But eventually it lead to last April where we were 8th in the nation at the Spring 2019 NSPA/JEA National High School Journalism convention.
Yeah, it’s not number 1. Yep, we’ve still got stuff to improve on. Sure, you might not have read all 3,000 posts, or even care about them. But we care. Our Timber Creek Talon reporters seek truth and report it. They help inform the entire TCHS community through their work. Their passion for telling stories, the skills they’re developing, and their effort is on display in any one of the 3,000 pieces of content on this site.
It’s the students that make Talon successful and help it grow and develop into a trusted source for news and information. And now, maybe more than ever, we need students who are able to find the truth, acquire real details, talk to people, and create content that’s objective and relevant.
Here’s to 3,000 more.
— Mr. Janda, Timber Creek Talon advisor.
Talon through the years:
