For the past several decades, Bear Facts has been an increasingly cumbersome monthly 12-16 page newspaper readers had to fold to fit into a backpack. It was quickly becoming a tired-looking black-and-white publication, with the occasional use of blue on the front or back cover. News coverage focused on events happening around Lake Zurich – but many times readers knew the news before Bear Facts had a chance to report it.

So late last year, the publication’s staff decided to reinvent Bear Facts. Welcome to your new Bear Facts, a multi-media approach to covering news and events in the school community.

The staff’s push to incorporate multiple forms of reporting is the driving force behind a change to “student media.” The staff will cover the same material as you have always seen but is offering new reader experiences, as well. LZBearFacts.com will now cover all news related to the school and community, leaving the magazine to focus on features about the people and stories of LZHS. On the inside, of

the magazine there are articles that are connected to the overall theme of the magazine, but there also those “reoccurring pieces,” like Bears Box and 60 Second Story, which will appear every issue, but are not necessarily connected to the month’s theme.

“Last year, I attended Media Now STL Journalism camp to learn about the impact of design on readership of a production. I believe Bear Facts decided to transition into a newsmagazine because we realized the way a newspaper looks is too traditional for this modern world,” Emily Hack, 2014 graduate and former Bear Facts editor, said. “Eventually, we would lose all readership if we continued the newspaper, so we figured to make the transition now and set a standard for the schools around us.”

One of the biggest reasons for the change is the fact that readers, along with the speed of news, have changed.

“No one has time to sit down and read a 900 word story anymore,” Genna Danial, senior on Bear Facts, said. “With the amount of social media apps we have, by the time the newspaper comes out, the readers have already known the news for hours, or even days.”

Armed with the knowledge that news moves faster than traditional print mediums, Bear Facts is also utilizing social media as a way to reach more readers and borrowing the highly visual medium of social media in offering a more eye-catching design.

“Apps like Instagram, which is based on pictures and not words, are becoming increasingly popular because, again, we don’t have time to read, but we do have time to look at pictures. That’s another reason we’re going to magazine. There are more pictures and less text,” Danial said. “We also had to prioritize having color, no more black and white, because grey pictures are [unattractive] to look at. The only thing worse than not having pictures is having grey, blurry, washed-out pictures.”

Bear Facts recognizes the black-and-white design of our old look was not reader friendly, and that includes the amount of text on a page. The more words, the more black-and-white a page looks, so the staff made a decision to limit the number of articles each issue so we could put a higher focus on graphics throughout all the stories.

We are designing and redefining the meaning of student media at LZHS. We welcome reader feedback on any of our social media outlets to improve our magazine and your reader experience to the best it can be.