User:Alex Faust

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BTHSnews.org is a student-run online newspaper that serves Brooklyn Technical High School in Brooklyn, NY. It was founded in 2001 and remains independent from the school in both its funding and its content. BTHSnews is also a student organization/club at Brooklyn Tech (while the club that feeds the website operates from within the school, the website does not).

Image:BTHSnews-1a.jpg
BTHSnews logo used 2004-present


Contents

[edit] History

[edit] 2001-2002

BTHSnews was created after the September 11 terrorist attacks when Stuyvesant High School was closed due to health concerns near the World Trade Center site. All of Stuyvesant's 3200+ students moved to Brooklyn Tech and students attended classes in split shifts. 2004-2005 BTHSnews President Cassandra Reyes noted that it was tough for information to get to the students:

“ Given how hard it is to distribute good info at Tech on a good day,... nobody really knew anything about the situation. New Stuy people had no idea how to get to Tech, what it was like, etc. We decided that we could help out by providing a single, convenient source for the best information we could find. ”

So five students, including Reyes, combined to report on what Tech and Stuyvesant studentc ould expect in the coming weeks and months. Once Stuyvesant moved out and things returned to relative normalcy, that webserver was moved as well and for a period of time, BTHSnews was ironically hosted at Stuyvesant High School.

The club/website was divided into two sections - reporting and advertising. As the hectic time surrounding 9/11 slowed down, so did the amount of news by the end of the 2002 school year. It was at that the year-end party that another tradition was started: the Sprite bottle. After food and drink was served, an empty Sprite bottle (with signatures from all of the staff members) was passed down to the next club/website president.

[edit] 2002-2003

During 2002-2003, club meetings were moved from a computer room to a normal classroom, making reporting and website work more difficult. There were great strides, however, that shaped future content at BTHSnews: a message board was started (later known as the BTHSnews Forums), and a project to create "Major Reviews" for all of the academic major choices at Brooklyn Tech was initiated. The "Major Reviews" project would not be carried out until 2005-2006 with only 8 of 13 majors represented.

This year was also the start of a string of stinging articles against then-Principal Lee McCaskill. The first article by New York Times reporter Michael Winerip, "On Education: Evaluating a Brooklyn Principal, Measure for Questionable Measure".

[edit] 2003-2004

In September of 2003, a string of suspicious fires were set inside Brooklyn Tech, prompting a lockdown by school officials. This instance magnified how Brooklyn Tech's official newspaper The Survey was unable to cover school news in a timely fashion. While BTHSnews was originally meant to supplement The Survey, by this time in many respects BTHSnews had surpassed it. During this time, BTHSnews hit a peak for the rate of articles being posted on the website, with multiple articles published each week.

This was the first year where growth of the Forums was starting to catch up with growth in readership of the main portal of the website, a trend which would continue into 2005. With the building controversy over McCaskill in another Times article, bad press surrounded Brooklyn Tech - something BTHSnews staff members embraced because of the available news stories and topics.

[edit] 2004-2005

The BTHSnews Forums continued their expansion, and the website moved to Invision Power Board for the forums and portal page, a system quickly removed after one year in use. While the website continued to expand in terms of readership and content, BTHSnews also attracted some negative attention with its articles on teacher Steve Ostrin, who was arrested and later acquitted of sexual harrassment charges. That article prompted school officials to confront the students running BTHSnews, asking them to refrain fron posting future articles about the case.

2005 also saw the last "original" or founding member of BTHSnews to graduate from Brooklyn Tech.

[edit] 2005-Present

In August of 2005, incoming president Alex Faust and now-webmaster Francis Gulotta installed a content management, Mambo (CMS) to replace the integrated portal/message board system. At the time, use of the BTHSnews Forums overshadowed content on the website. The new website allowed dynamic features once on the original website such as special headers, modules, and polls to return to the front page. While content publication was not at 2003 levels, readership surged, partly due to events surrounding the school, which produced several widely circulated articles.

Notable articles:

[edit] Current Website

Mambo installation, now

[edit] BTHSnews Presidents & Staff

List them

[edit] The Future

[edit] External links

!Category:Newspapers !Category:Student_newspapers !Category:Student_newspapers_published_in_the_United_States