Sam Capece
News Editor

For many years now, Orono students and staff have looked forward to receiving the school newspaper, The Spartan Speaks, full of interesting articles written by their peers. What many don’t realize is the amount of time and effort that goes into creating up to four editions of the paper every year. Students need to format articles, pictures, and everything in between to make the paper look amazing.

With the growth of technology, The Spartan Speaks has expanded to become an online news source with a website, app, and social media profiles. This new platform combined with the small class size means that students were responsible for a large workload. Not to mention the price of the newspaper costing around 800 dollars per edition.

“Students in Journalism were being stretched too thin with both print and online editions. We have so many awesome ideas for multimedia projects and broadcasts online and we want to give students more options to be creative,” Journalism teacher Kyle Herring said.

With so many students on their phones and computers, The Spartan Speaks staff wants to provide timely articles directly to readers, as well as utilize more creative avenues of Journalism. Although the novelty of the print edition is gone, ultimately The Spartan Speaks has adapted to the times, where online media is highly valued.

“There were a lot of factors that happened all at once. We had mostly seniors last year, so with the smaller class size and budget, we decided to put 100 percent into the online media this year,” Editor in Chief Kenzie Taylor said.