The Future of the Wetlands Post

As the Year 12s enter the final week of exam block and the second last week of high school, it is a good time to talk about the long term existence of the Wetlands Post.

I originally developed this site for an official school newspaper, run by the College Captains and the student council. However, due to already high workloads and a lack of enthusiasm, the project was put on the “back-burner”.

It was given new life on the 2nd of October as the underground, independent Wetlands Post. From ruthless exposés about the cafeteria and groundbreaking reports on Peel’s financial recklessness to exclusive coverage of Celebration Day, we have tirelessly fulfilled our duty to speak truth to power.

In the last 30 days the site has had over 4000 page views and the Instagram account has over 100 followers.

However, a concern often raised was the perceived wisdom, or lack thereof, in starting a newspaper led primarily by Grade 12s only six weeks from graduation. Six out of the seven total contributors will soon leave.

This newspaper was always intended to be crowd-sourced. Anyone who wants to write an article, please email it to [email protected]. If it is funny, topical and doesn’t go too far over the line, it will be published.

There is a role, though, that must soon be filled by at least one person: the editor. This position as head of the Wetlands Post will be responsible for receiving articles, editing and publishing them. It will be up to them to judge if articles are appropriate enough, of good quality and fit with the feel of the site. I think it would be best, though not required, for this person to be a current Year 11 (incoming Year 12).

Additionally, a ‘webmaster’ would be ideal to maintain and change the site when required. This should be someone with knowledge of web technologies, hosting etc. and a willingness to learn. See below for details.

Please contact [email protected] if you want to fill one of these roles.

Put simply, if you want this website to continue it needs new writers and it needs at least one new editor. Only those remaining at the school can achieve this. I can only help with the transition.

And if not, then this newspaper will end, but the spirit of the Wetlands Post will live on within all of us.

Some further information

Editors

I set up a front-end CMS called Sveltia for publishing without having to mess with the underlying tech (see below), accessible for admins here. The email “[email protected]” currently just forwards to my personal email, and can be rerouted to whoever, if anyone, succeeds me.

Technical aspects

The site is built using Hugo and a custom theme. You can read the documentation at the link to get a feel for it. The project is stored at Github and the site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, all for zero cost (except for the domain at $10 a year). TailwindCSS is used for styling.