Once again, TCT adviser Ken George and the TCT staff are ready to head out to the Michigan Interscholastic Press Association conference in Lansing. The TCT staff has been attending MIPA for about fifteen years, and they learn from each experience.

When attending last year, George realized that his staff was ahead of the game in comparison to other schools. George believes that the staff this year is unique enough to share their own story at MIPA.

As a result, TCT staff has announced that they are going to be speaking at the conference about what they have been up to.

“I feel like it’s our opportunity to finally shine and show the other programs around how gifted our staff is,” George said.

MSU School of Journalism created MIPA to promote and recognize excellence in scholastic journalism. Their annual meeting brings around two thousand student journalists together to “educate, train, and support” them in their journey.

TCT will be speaking for a portion of the second session during the conference about how the analytics of their website has grown since last year. From six print editions to over ten thousand hits online, TCT has plenty to talk about at MIPA.

“I kind of want it to be about our story, when we first decided to go online, how we did it, where we are going next, and the process that we used,” George said. “Hopefully staffs can say “Oh shoot, we have to start doing that.a�� Even if we give fifteen to twenty ideas, and they can take two, we can all benefit a lot from that.”

One of the Editors in Chief, junior Reena Mathews, believes that MIPA will be a confidence boost for the staff writers.

“I think that we forget how amazing we are, how much we’ve grown, and how amazing our analytics are,” Reena said. “We are hoping to inspire other websites and maybe learn more.”

The other Editor in Chief, senior Hannah Kos, is also excited to present the team’s ideas at MIPA.

Both Hannah and Reena found that other school’s websites are the “backburner” to their print edition and how moving to a website can grow their audience. They agree that most school news websites only post once in awhile and don’t look pleasing to the eye.

“We think that it would be cool if this became a bigger thing- not just our school but all over the state- where people could go to their school websites rather than MLive,” Hannah said.