Hi there. If you’re reading this, welcome to theredledger.net! You are reading the first story ever posted on this website. This website is the beginnings of a promising online newspaper for Lovejoy High School. I’m Ginger Hervey, and along with Liz Schasel, we will be the editors-in-chief of this publication for the 2011-2012 school year.  Mr. Brian Higgins will be our advisor, and along with 19 other high school students (give or take one or two, schedules are still being finalized) we will make up the staff of this online newspaper.

To be honest, nobody on this staff has any experience with online journalism.  Actually, to be really honest, nobody on this staff (excepting Mr. Higgins) has extensive experience with any journalism! I have four years on staff, and I believe Liz has three, but mostly we are a first or second year class of high schoolers. We hope you will bear with us as we work out the kinks of a new operating system.

This being said, I speak for the entire class when I say we have high hopes for this website.  Our first priority is providing timely and relevant news to the Lovejoy community in the best form possible.  That has always been the goal of the Red Ledger, and at the end of last year we were faced with a tough decision. Our former editor-in-chief, the wonderful UT freshman Helen Hansen, along with the staff of past years, created, fostered, and expanded the printed version of the Red Ledger from a little known, amateur paper produced by a handful of students into a professional, award-winning newspaper available to an entire community. However, although the Red Ledger was improving in printed form and becoming more advanced, the technology of our generation was racing ahead of us as Ipads, smart phones, laptops, and ebooks began to turn newspapers into a thing of the past.

When Mr. Higgins first came to Helen, Liz, and I about converting the Red Ledger into an online publication, we did not take it well, to say the least. All three of us instantly jumped to point out the faults of an online paper. However, as each of us went home disgruntled with the thought of our years of work being negated by the insatiable black hole that is the Internet, we slowly (and unwillingly, at first) began to see the many advantages of an online newspaper.

Four months after the decision was made to go online (and not without our fair share of kicking and screaming), I couldn’t imagine it any other way. I am incredibly excited to see where this website takes the Red Ledger, and I am already proud to be one of its founding members.