Like the campus itself, NCSSM-Morganton’s student-led newspaper, The Tower Tribune, is developing its potential. But just like the campus that continues to rise in the North Carolina foothills, the paper is already far beyond where they were just a year ago.

The editorial board for the Tribune was finalized in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which ravaged the western region of North Carolina in September of 2024.  Coping with such a disruption to daily life meant that the founding staff was able to produce only one digital edition of around 15 articles. 

Noah Senzon, an NCSSM-Morganton senior who came to NCSSM from Asheville High School, was one of the paper’s founding staff members. He is now the paper’s lead editor.

“Having a newspaper is something that’s super important in any high school, especially in a school where there’s so much going on and so much happens behind the scenes,” he says. “Everyone kind of operates in their own little hemisphere, so we all thought that it was really a good idea to have something to kind of get campus news out there, get people aware of things happening both on campus and in the world in general.”

The first edition of the Tribune was a “trial run,” Noah says. The staff did not meet regularly as a group, and stories were being written almost on a freelance basis and then collected for publication, with no unifying organizing structure. 

The result, Noah says, was that “a lot of the stories felt very rushed.” 

Generating readership was difficult, too. With no money available to produce traditional print editions of the paper (a persistent challenge for the team), the paper’s founding staff relied on a Google site created in-house to carry the stories and leaned heavily upon campus-wide emails and an Instagram account to market the publication. The results were marginal.

“We just weren’t able to get a lot of traction,” Noah says.

This year is an entirely different story. The entire staff now meets once a week, where they brainstorm ideas, then assign stories based on a reporter’s affinity for the piece. They’ve also created inexpensive flyers to distribute around campus that mimic the front page of the paper and have a QR code that links to the paper’s website. Efforts have also been made to enhance the usefulness of the paper’s Instagram account.

Though not part of the group that formalized The Tower Tribune,  Chloe Ellis, a senior from Watauga High School in Boone, was also one of the paper’s staff members last year. She is now the paper’s Vice President. Streamlining the Tribune’s leadership has helped make the paper more efficient, she says.

“We had just so many committees [last year],” Chloe says. “Everything kind of felt separate from each other in a way. So, this year, Noah and I decided to limit that to just the two of us, and now people can just come to him or me with questions or suggestions.”

The revision to the paper’s operational and marketing approach is paying off. “Our readership,” says Noah, “has definitely been improving this year.”

Meltem Safak, an Instructor of American Studies and Humanities at NCSSM-Morganton, is one of two faculty sponsors of the paper. The Tribune, she says, is a necessary platform for students on campus to share their interests and learn about the successes and accomplishments of their classmates. It’s also a great training ground for students looking to stretch their editorial or journalistic muscles.

“We have a research journal and also a literary magazine, but those publications focus on a different kind of language and a different kind of production,” she says. “They don’t necessarily incorporate the language of journalism, which comes with different priorities and a different sense of opinion. Students who are really interested in journalism find this platform very useful to get comfortable with the language of journalism.”

A second edition of the paper will soon be published on its website, with a few more anticipated before the end of the school year. Chloe and Noah have hope that the paper will continue to grow under future leadership.

“I’m hoping we get more members on the paper’s staff,” Chloe says. “A lot of the feedback that we get is from people who want to take part. If we can get more people involved, it will be easier to write short and longer articles.”

Noah anticipates a more productive and efficient publication as the standardization of the newsroom that began this year carries over into future iterations of the paper. And though a lack of funding right now prohibits it, he’s hopeful that one day, students will  be able to hold a physical publication in their hands that they can leaf through and fold back the pages of.

“Getting that,” he says, would be amazing.”

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