Our coverage of prep sports on the Peninsula is being provided through an innovative partnership between Embarcadero Media and the journalism programs of local public and private high schools on the Peninsula.

It was conceived after discussions with student editors and their high school journalism advisors, afterwhich our IT staff developed a prototype system for using automated feeds of sports stories from each local high school publication website. We then redesigned our sports web page to present an aggregated listing of these stories so readers could easily stay current on prep sports on the Peninsula, as well as see how different high school publications cover games and other prep sports issues.

This unique collaboration between a news organization and high school journalism programs may be the first of its kind and, we hope, a potential model for other communities. Our sports web page displays all the sports stories written by the student journalists for their publications and websites. The headlines, first paragraphs and the names of the originating high school publication appear on this web page with links to the full stories on the student publications’ websites. Readers can choose to see a list of all the sports stories from every local high school or filter the results for just one high school publication.

In addition to the sports stories from the high school publications, our staff and freelancers will periodically supplement with additional coverage as seems appropriate. Parents, students and other readers are encouraged to self-report the scores, stats and submit photos of local prep sports events for publication on the site. This “crowdsourcing” approach to the coverage of high school sports is a way you can help and participate in publicizing high school sports. Coaches, parents and athletes are urged to report the game scores as soon as possible so that others learn the results.

While high school student journalists obviously don’t have the level of experience of professional journalists, they know their athletic programs and athletes far better than our staff or freelancers ever could. By presenting the full breadth of sports coverage created by all the local high school journalists, our goal is to offer a useful and interesting view of both game coverage and local sports feature stories.

A crucial element of this program is that the stories reside on the websites of each high school and when readers click on a link from our website they are taken to the full story on the high school publications’ website. The work of these high school journalists therefore gets much greater exposure and their own websites receive increased traffic. The high school student editors retain complete control over the content and editing of their stories and hold the copyright to their stories.

We hope you enjoy this new approach to covering high school sports. We expect to add enhancements in the future and welcome your feedback and ideas to editor@paloaltoonline.com.