Much is happening in the world and at school: the release of hostages in Israel have been suspended, the Super Bowl just ended and we have a new controversial president. All students at de Toledo knew that these things were happening without having to even glance at the school’s newspaper. One of the problems is that much of the information presented in The Prowler is simply delayed. For example, on Oct. 28, 2024, I published a full length article about the school organizing a one- year anniversary town hall for the Oct. 7 attacks, but this information had already been released on Instagram on the actual day of the town hall three weeks earlier. By the time that the article was published, everyone had already forgotten about that town hall. The reason articles are delayed in this matter is because students get less than one hour per day to write their articles. For the rest of the day, they tend to be preoccupied with other activities, and are often unable to complete their article before it loses relevance.

In a professional news workplace, reporters and writers are occupied with one thing throughout the day: the news. They go to work thinking about news; they sit at their desk and do nothing but find stories for the news; they have no meetings at any point in the day that are not related to the news. School newspapers, on the other hand, usually are developed by a team of students who meet for less than an hour, a few times a week.

Throughout the remainder of the day, school reporters are often preoccupied with their academics when they are trying to write articles. Since a student reporter has to allocate their time to all of their other classes for the majority of the day, they cannot dedicate even a majority of their day to writing for the school newspaper. 

So what can we do?

The readers of The Prowler can and will do little to rectify the situation since they are not dependent on our newspaper. Whether or not another article is published will be of no concern to them as The Prowler is no one’s primary source for either school or world events. The best that can be done to bring relevancy to The Prowler is simply to boost the rate at which articles are published. However, even if The Prowler is to remain delayed and somewhat irrelevant, the world will still survive. We are students, and the world will not suffer greatly from a lack of articles. Sometimes there is no solution, but sometimes that is not a bad thing.