Ten years after its first publication, Boone’s award winning school newspaper, The Rebellion, is officially on the web.

It can be found at the address www.BCHSRebellion.com.

The website, which began its construction last September, will allow for more avenues of media than the paper traditionally has.

“It’s very exciting,” journalism teacher Lance Melching said, “I hope we can use the website to launch the class into new directions, whether it’s podcasts, video stories or wherever else we can think to take it.”

Melching, who recognizes that the newspaper is currently only read by a small fraction of the school, hopes the website will reach a wider audience.

“I think the kids in this class do quality work and I want to get that in front of their peers as much as I can,” Melching said.

Though there has been the concept of a website for years, Melching’s concerns over the limited time and inexperience within his class had always caused him to dismiss the idea—that was, until he attended a journalism advisors retreat last summer.

After meeting with people from around the state during the retreat, Melching decided to finally pursue the idea.

He became sold on SNO, an online web-builder which targets journalism programs and allows them the freedom and ease of access he had been seeking.

Shortly thereafter, Melching received the funding he needed to progress with the project, but struggled to find the time to work on the website.

Melching, having limited expertise in website building, tasked sophomore Morgan Daniels, a Journalism 2 student, with starting the website.

Every fall semester, Journalism 2 students like Daniels are given an independent project for the class.

At the beginning of the school year, Melching sat down with Daniels and explained the concept to her.

“Morgan and I agreed that she would push the idea of a website, so then she spent a greater half of the first semester working on it,” Melching said. “She was the one who brought it to life.”

Morgan, as the head of the project, said her biggest learning curve was figuring everything out independently. Melching did not have time to help her much.

“There was no one around who could really help me, so I had to learn how to work things all on my own,” she said. “It was a lot of work.”

In the earlier stages of the website, Daniels and another student, Cole Waymeyer, went out to publish coverage of last fall’s homecoming, mainly to experiment with how it would all work. Since then, a handful of other content has become available on the website as well, including many stories from last month’s paper.

A push Melching made to prepare for the website was creating a successful proposal to the School Based Decision Making counsel to request funding for a new camera, specifically a Nikon D7500.

The previous one used, Melching’s personal camera, was 15 years old. Melching said a new camera hadn’t been a priority until the creation of the website.

“As The Rebellion has always been printed in black and white on newsprint, low image quality has not been a tremendous hindrance” a section Melching’s proposal read.

The new camera has already assisted the class with creating “photo galleries” for the website.

The goal of the photo galleries is to capture a wider variety of  school related events, something the paper had previously been unable to achieve, due to the lack of space in a newspaper.

Melching said the next steps for the website are to upload archives of old newspaper editions, and develop staff profiles.

Although only those participating in the journalism classes can post to the website, students outside the class are welcome to submit cartoons or letters to the editor by contacting  Melching. He can be reached at [email protected].\