Welcome to the LGB Express’ first edition for 2021-22! As your editorial team, our mission is to guide the express into bringing relevant, accurate, and interesting information about LGB to our readers every Monday morning. Whether our reporting is about school events, interviews with beloved teachers, or student perspectives on hot topics at school, we believe at the Express that the knowledge we bring will create a more informed, connected community. We would like to take the opportunity of the first edition to share some of our major focuses as we enter the coming year.
First, we are excited to be leading the Express this year, as March 2022 will mark a decade of reporting by and for LGB’s secondary school students. We plan on having various articles exploring the questions we all want answered, from the history of the Express and its founders to the history of LGB itself, including stories from some of our very own LGB teachers and staff members. We are also planning on contacting members of the alumni community, including some of those who were here when the IB was just beginning in the 1960’s. They will share stories of school work, camaraderie, love, and a few pranks from their time at LGB, allowing you, the students of today, to experience what life was like then at LGB. We hope you will join us on the journey of this year as we investigate the past and celebrate how far we have come as a school and a newspaper.
One of our main aims for the year is to ensure that every story published in the Express is directly related to school life. The purpose of the Express is to bring knowledge about the school to the school community, and therefore the most interesting stories are those that link directly to LGB. We believe it is much more interesting to read about the school from the school newspaper, rather than to read world news from the school newspaper. As one of the founding editors of the Express, Kingsley Taveau, said in a 2018 opinion piece about the founding of the Express, “the distinguishing quality between the great and the OK articles was how the pieces tied to the school.” This remains true to this day. We believe that there are a wealth of exciting perspectives on our campus, and our articles will be unique pieces that can only be published here, by students who know the school.
We also hope to increase readership during the course of this year, in particular by working on making the newspaper bilingual. We aim to work more with the French department in order to have a greater outreach among the francophone students, and we encourage all students, no matter what their level of French is, to write articles in both languages! We are also excited to be starting a new multilingual initiative, where we will be publishing articles in languages other than English and French from time to time. This will emphasize the linguistic and cultural diversity of LGB’s campus and provide a bit of fun, interesting content to those who speak the specific language of publication!
Another goal of ours is to strengthen the relationship between the editors and the writers. This will partly be done through newly-established monthly writer meetings, where we are hoping to foster a more collaborative atmosphere and encourage interaction between writers and the editorial team. This will help ensure that everyone on the Express’ team is passionate and engaged.
Finally, we would like to highlight some of the Express’ principle values that have remained stable over the past decade. First and foremost, we are committed to sharing the truth of the students, by the students. This means publishing exactly what is happening, even if it does not align with the official narrative. Second, we believe that the Express should have unbiased reporting based on the facts, and writer opinions will not be given outside of specifically designated opinion pieces in certain sections. For instance, in the Editorials sections, we are committed to publishing a variety of student opinion pieces and letters from the editorial team throughout the year. In the Expressed section, students are free to voice their creative side, which we encourage to be related to current events and global issues.
We always value the personal interest and expression of each and every writer on our team. We want them to be engaged with the material, and we encourage them to propose articles they feel are relevant to the school and that they have a passion to write, because we believe that interested and engaged writers make for interested and engaged readers.
We have set ambitious goals this year to be able to continue to carry forward the values of the Express and build on ten amazing years of work. For more about the editorial team, check out the “Current Staff” page in the “About” tab. And remember to check our website every Monday for the week’s edition. Happy reading!
– Your 2021-2022 Editorial Team
