Hi, folks. My name is Blue Linden, and I’m the web manager here at The Verdict. My job is to work with the ideas and people behind the website here. This project has taken four months to grow from a generic, little seed of an idea into a massive, custom behe­moth of a jour­nal­ism website.

So many of our stories haven’t been told, and we’d like to change that.

I’m not content with launch­ing a regu­lar student news­pa­per website. I came here to inno­vate on the medium, and I think I’ve stum­bled across an amaz­ing idea.

Many Justice students don’t partic­i­pate in spirit days because they don’t know where to find rele­vant infor­ma­tion. They bring a back­pack on Wear Anything But a Back­pack Day. Well, does anyone want to go look­ing for ten minutes just to find that piece of infor­ma­tion? Absolutely not! I could­n’t even find it in Schoology!

Some of the most needed pieces of infor­ma­tion, like major school assem­blies, clos­ings and bell sched­ules, are super hard to find. No one bene­fits from this, so we did some brain­storm­ing and came up with:

The Justify.

It ain’t your regu­lar column. It’s updated daily with rele­vant infor­ma­tion, and each update is shorter than a Twit­ter post. Perfect for check­ing once or twice a day, to stay up to date on all things Justice.

You can find it on the home­page at the very top, or at thever​dic​tjhs​.com/​j​ustify.

But hey, we can’t just make our own little daily updates thing and do noth­ing else. We’ll be work­ing on amaz­ing, orig­i­nal content that exists nowhere else to be published exclu­sively here. And all of the arti­cles in The Verdic­t’s print edition will be here, as well. We want to do really cool stuff here.

And to all you other news­pa­per staffs read­ing this, 

I wish you luck. A common theme among many schools with jour­nal­ism programs in the area is the treat­ment of the website as The Second Thing™. I’d like to shout out The High­lander and tjTO­DAY for having amaz­ing arti­cles, insights and a wonder­ful print maga­zine. But if you really think about it, the first impres­sion people will get is from your website. I’d like to think we have the edge on that now. Go Wolves! 

Oh, and by the way, we look forward to hope­fully seeing all of you at the VHSL Media Cham­pi­onships later this year.

Lake Barcroft, VA. About half a mile from Justice.