What is Reddit's opinion of School Newspaper Adviser's Survival Guide?

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I did a Journalism class in Middle School for 2 years for 7th/8th where we did the school "paper" (blog and bulletin boards -- no paper copies per se) and we also did Yearbook. The Yearbook was our big project/focus so your class will obviously be different, but what we did with the paper was divide the students into rotating departments, except editors/leaders who stayed in a single department.

The second year my editors were returning 8th grade students (7th graders the year before) getting a Middle School Journalism 2 credit, but the first year, I had to start from scratch, so they were people who applied for the categories and wrote samples that fit their category.

Our categories were:

1) Feature stories (yearbook and newspaper overlap)

2) Sports (yearbook and newspaper overlap)

3) Clubs and extracurriculars (yearbook and newspaper overlap)

4) World and local news (they did the academic pages for yearbook)

5) Reviews (movies, music, restaurants) and style (yearbook and newspaper overlap kind of -- they did the polls and fashion for yearbook)

6) Advice, announcements, and extras (yearbook and newspaper overlap)

The kids brainstormed the categories with my guidance. Each category had an editor, plus I had a Photo Editor and Chief Editor.

Each month starting in October (we started with fundamentals in the first 6 weeks), they rotated. We only have 5 weeks between Dec./Nov with our schedule so that counted as 1 month, so this went to the end of April. The last 6 weeks were also different and more free form. I created assignments for each category, some of which were teaching the type of journalism and photography most useful to that category and some of which were their authentic assignments that got published.

I also had mini lessons weekly on journalism, writing, and photography skills in general, based on what we needed to work on. I also did the equivalent of a "Genius" hour and gave them 1/5 of their time weekly to work on some kind of journalism project they devised. This was setup in the first 6 weeks where we explored what journalism is, examples in real life, and, in our case, also setup expectations for Yearbook and visiting classrooms and such. Then each person developed a personal SMART goal and deliverable they wanted to work on or set of deliverables. It had to be pretty ambitious. Some created Youtube channels, some wrote personal blogs, it varied.

The only book/resource I used that really helped me was School Newspaper Adviser's Survival Guide: http://www.amazon.com/dp/078796624X/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_2?pf_rd_p=1944687462&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0786430605&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1HZ8RV42MBP4ZVEKEJ8A

I didn't use it that much though and none of the other books really worked for my MS kids at all. That book would be very useful in HS proper, I'd imagine. My class the first year was actually made up of a combination of the few kids who had an elective writing class that got cancelled due to low interest (about 10 kids out of 2 sections, 45 kids total) and the super at-risk kids at a Title 1 MS who were identified as potentially not going to make it for academic or behavioral reasons and part of this was to help them be a part of the community and develop better relationships with the school. It worked really well for them.

But our district restricted electives at schools with low test scores (and my old Title 1 was a very at-risk school) and Journalism was cut. They only allowed intensive reading, intensive math, STEM electives and the old traditional PE, art, band to remain.