The Eclipse earns three badges, strives for more

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IMAGE / Aysia Booth

The Eclipse has earned three badges this year: story excellence, continuous coverage, and site page excellence.

The goal of The Eclipse is to not only have continuous coverage, but also excellent execution going with that coverage.

The student newspaper has achieved that and has been recognized by the publishing company Student Newspapers Online, or SNO.

The Eclipse has earned three badges during the year so far, and is working to earn two more.

These badges are the continuous coverage badge, excellence in writing badge, and site excellence badge.

The continuous coverage badge requires sites to have regular updates on news stories within the community.

The excellence in writing badge requires at least three stories, which are considered to be top-notch stories, be published on Best of SNO, which is a national student news site.

The site excellence badge requires Kearsley’s site to have a specific design to showcase all of the stories with a “clear sense of purpose.”

So far, there are 65 schools in Michigan using the SNO program and only two of those sites have received one or more badges, which includes The Eclipse.

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We have been writing more, and that allowed us to get three badges. Now, we are pushing to get two more: story page excellence and audience engagement.

— Katie Valley, The Eclipse editor in chief

The other school has only received one badge, the site excellence badge, while The Eclipse has already earned three.

The most badges a site may earn is six, and that is what The Eclipse is striving to do.

Katie Valley, editor in chief, is proud of how far the site has come since its start last year.

“The Eclipse has been doing really well this year,” Valley said. “We have been writing more, and that allowed us to get three badges. Now, we are pushing to get two more: story page excellence and audience engagement.”

Valley, a senior, encourages everyone to like The Eclipse on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for the audience engagement badge.

“We need fewer than 100 more followers to qualify for the badge,” Valley said. “It would be great to be able to get it.”