About School Newspapers Online
Who We Are
Launched in the summer of 2008 by Jason Wallestad and Tom Hutchinson, School Newspapers Online is a company based in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. We focus specifically on the needs of scholastic news publications looking to create or enhance their presence on the Internet.
Jason has been a high-school newspaper adviser and teacher for over 17 years in Minnesota and South Dakota. He is currently an English teacher and school newspaper adviser at Benilde-St. Margaret’s School in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. Tom is an Internet veteran, having worked in the industry for over 10 years as a software trainer, project manager, and product manager.
How We Began
School Newspapers Online began as we teamed up to build a school newspaper Web site for the newspaper that Jason advises, the Knight Errant, which won an NSPA Online Pacemaker award in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Since building this initial site, we have launched more than 500 websites for school newspapers.
Our Mission
We’ve designed our websites to address the concerns and needs of newspaper and faculty advisers and their staffs. In an era of tight funding, we know that school newspapers are often one of the early casualties during budget cuts. That’s why our biggest priority in creating this company was to keep our sites and services affordable. But don’t let our low price fool you –– our sites are as functional and as professionally designed as those used by major news operations. We build all of our sites on open-source software, and that’s helped us to keep our costs low.
We know how overwhelming changing technology can be –– our services are designed to take care of all the technological challenges for you. As our clients use our sites and grow in their knowledge and understanding of online publishing and website design, we’ll be there to help by answering any type of question they have regarding the use, design, and function of their site.
When we set out on this project, we wanted to create professional quality websites that are fully-customizable, highly-functional, completely affordable, and absolutely easy to use. We believe that we’ve succeeded in reaching our goal, and we are proud to offer you and your student journalists the chance to make your school newspaper relevant in today’s online age. We would love to get you and your program started on the Web and give you the guidance you need to prepare your students for the everchanging world of modern journalism.
What’s Next
In the process of working with so many schools across the country, we found that many rely on outdated Web sites that lack all the features available on the Web today. So we have started a new endeavor, School Webworks, to offer the same great services to schools that we do for school newspapers.
