All the Warrior news that’s fit to print

Don’t look for any Woodward-and-Bernstein investigations just yet, but several Ozaukee High School students are dipping their toes into the world of journalism with the launch of a school newspaper this semester.

The Warrior Weekly is the school’s first student newspaper in four years and one of the few, if not the only, student newspapers in the area, adviser and OHS English teacher Katie Jozwowski said.

“It’s very exciting,” she said. “I thought of it last year but put it off because it was my first year. I reached out to a couple students over summer and they hopped on it. They were so excited.”

To be honest, the Warrior Weekly is not really a newspaper because it appears online only, but the hope is to one day put ink to paper in a more literal sense, Jozwowski said.

“One day we hope to get it printed, but currently it’s just online,” she said.

The hope, when it is printed, is to be able to sell copies at school and sporting events, she said.

That would be important for junior Molly Kirmse, one of the paper’s staff members.

“The paper gives us something to look back on. If we do get hard copies, I’ll be able to look back on it and show my family what I was a part of. It’s really valuable to look back at those things,” she said.

Jozwowski said the majority of the 14 or so students involved with the paper are most interested in photography, but others are interested in design and writing.

Cecilia Rice, for instance, said she wants to write.

“I don’t have a set career path,” she said. “But I really love to write about things I care about.”

Rice said she especially enjoyed interviewing and writing about Fredonia resident Norman Jagow, a 96-year-old World War II veteran who has lived in the village since 1933 and remembers when horses and buggies were commonplace on the village streets.

“I really enjoyed getting to talk to him,” she said.

The Warrior Weekly’s features include a Warrior Shout Out to highlight someone who “deserves a shout out for being awesome!”

Other regular features include Copper’s Corner, a column ostensibly written by Copper, the school’s therapy dog.

News includes interviews with school staff on their favorite foods, including the pluses and minuses of a Culver’s reuben sandwich, coverage of the school’s sports teams and movie reviews.

The newspaper is an extracurricular activity for the students, meaning they work on it outside of their regular classes.

“We have a lot of meetings where we bounce ideas off one another and see where we want to go,” Jozwowski said. “I tend to act as the overall publisher. I have the final word.”

Jozwowski has no background in journalism or publishing, but as a college student at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh majoring in education, she took many classes with journalism students.

“Hearing about what they were doing was very exciting,” she said. “I thought I could use that in the classroom.”

A 2015 Port Washington High School graduate, Jozwowski said there was nothing like Warrior Weekly when she was in high school.

The paper is in a start-up phase, which means fundraising, she said. Her first goal is to raise money to buy a higher-quality camera, which she estimates will cost about $400.

She said she also hopes to help students learn about making videos.

Although the name says the paper is a weekly, some weeks there isn’t enough news or features to justify the name, she said.

“We started wanting to do it every other week, but with Covid we ended up not having as many events to cover,” Jozwowski said.

Email blasts to staff and students is how the publication is distributed.

“The kids really like it. I think it’s something they can enjoy for years to come,” Jozwowski said.

“Right now, the kids are doing it for fun. But I can see a passion in them that this might be something they want to get into,” she said. “I can see a lot of their wheels turning.”

The Warrior Weekly can be found online at sites.google.com/nosd.edu/warriorweekly.