The Knight Errant (KE), the official student news publication of BSM Senior High School, was created around the 1950s. Students get the KEQ magazines and read stories, but they don’t know much about the history of KE.

OLD TIMES

Knight Errant was probably started by a group of students in Benilde just for fun. They wrote stories like “The best teacher in Benilde” to entertain and mess around. However, they gradually became the newspaper club at BSM, which is known as KE.

Back in 1995, KE only published printed copies. There was a lack of internet or any other advanced technology we use now. In order to publish an issue and hand it to the students, there was a ton of work that had to be done. “We had to type everything out, and print out every single page, and line it up, and all the photos needed to get developed… cropped… [We] pieced everything together and taped the final copy to board…. Someone took it to the copy press…” former KE adviser Ms. Anne Marie Dominguez said.

Even though the KE was a lot of work, it was still also a lot of fun and not overwhelming. “It was fun…. we would all stay after school. We would work as late as ten o clock, but we would order pizza, have music going…” Dominguez said.

The KE team worked hard, but students also got extra privileges. They could get a pass for a senior editor to leave the campus if they needed to go interview in their free hours. Also, they got to sign up with organizations that would send KE passes to events as part of their promotion. “We would get tickets for concerts and movies to do reviews,” Dominguez said.

CHANGES

KE is always evolving. When video became popular, KE added videos. When the internet became widely used, Jason Wallestad, former Journalism Teacher and KE Adviser, captured the future of publication.

Wallestad developed two online internet editing platforms: SNO and FLOW. With Flow, students and advisers can organize and edit the articles online. With SNO, journalists are able to edit the layout or design and publish the stories. Those two platforms could greatly help newspaper clubs to organize and publish stories. Right now, there are 2476 high school news sites and 312 college news sites using SNO worldwide.

By connecting with the internet and technology, KE was able to publish stories online in 2008. The online newspaper site gives KE the ability to reach out to more people and other schools. As a result, when Wallestad was an adviser, KE expanded into five different categories: graphic design, journalistic writing, editorial leadership, photojournalism, and video journalism. The members in KE also quickly grew.

However, the Knight Errant shifted the whole curriculum back recently into just the Journalistic Writing and Editorial Leadership classes. “Instead, we are expecting everyone to learn all the skills. Everybody learns some graphic design, everybody learns some video, everybody gets to know different pieces of journalism,” KE Adviser Ms. Kari Koshiol said.

The booming technology is key in traditional media these days. “Technology has changed so much from when we were doing it. I mean, everything was rudimentary with the videotaping and all of that… we were kind of limited a little bit,” Dominguez said.

In recent years, KE has been publishing and sharing stories on social media such as TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook. Social media has become a necessary tool for traditional media to promote itself. “We have to use it, whether we like it or not, or we are just going to be left behind,” KE adviser Ms. Tiffany Joseph said.

With the promotion of social media and the internet, KE‘s audience keeps increasing. From 2008 to 2009, KE had 86,837 page views and 14,249 users. KE had 2,577,071 total page views since 2013 and 590,154 users.
Over time, KE is basically still doing the same kind of stories: hard news stories, feature stories, sport, entertainment, and opinions. Also, KE’s target audience is always the students, the parents, the whole BSM community. However, whenever they have controversial stories, people can still find the paper and get mad. Fun Fact: KE used to have horoscopes on their page. It was all fortunes made up by students.

FUTURE

Overall, KE advisers all believe the future of KE is determined by the students. Instead of giving instructions to the staff members, advisers love seeing the scene that people create by themselves. “We try to [make] Knight Errant [as] student-run as possible. Student writers, student editors, student photographers, student videos,” Joseph and Koshiol said.