Finally done with a long day of school, Patrick Fairchild, Stevenson Network News (SNN) sponsor, walks towards the SNN studio. Entering the studio, Fairchild is surrounded by the joyous energy of his colleagues and SNN members, and chatters between the group of students. As the crew set up the camera, fix up the microphones, and finalize the scripts, Fairchild smiles while watching them slowly catch his love for filming.
SNN has been part of Stevenson for nearly three decades, bringing the latest information on club and school-wide activities to students every single day. Each and every day, the content has been produced by the hours of combined efforts of the sponsors and the day’s SNN anchors. While the SNN we see today is student made skits and ads, this was not true for the entirety of SNN.
“SNN started in the mid-1990s when the school first put TV monitors into classrooms,” Fairchild said. “Before then, teachers would just read the announcements out loud.”
From individually spoken announcements, Fairchild says the school has now allocated SNN its own filming studio with teleprompters, editing stations, and lighting equipment, which is also what allows them to create the videos students see today. While ensuring the quality of videos, the daily broadcast must also make sure that the length of the videos meet the time limit.
“First period gives us four or five minutes to show the broadcast without cutting into class,” SNN co-sponsor Ryan Aronoff said. “That’s when students hear about club meetings, sports games, or events like dances. Club sponsors send us their videos by noon the day before. Those commercials are usually 15 to 45 seconds long.”
Students watching the show often find themselves paying the closest attention to these commercials. Mattia Birtig ’27, who tunes in every morning, is one who sees the appeal of these commercials. Beyond entertainment, Birtig explained that SNN is a resource for him to stay informed about events he otherwise might have missed.
“The ads are really what I watch just because my friends are in them, and they’re [very] funny,” Birtig said. “I mean, without them, I wouldn’t know about some of the events that I had a lot of fun at, like Streetfest.”
To create the broadcasts, students like Birtig see every morning, members of SNN obtain information from the daily digest to write the scripts. The process of producing SNN videos often requires the collaboration between crew members and the sponsors, and having the time and effort to put into filming.
“We film during eighth hour with a crew of six students,” Fairchild said. “Two of them are on camera, and the other four are running sound, teleprompter, and directing.”
The work doesn’t end after filming wraps up. Once all the content is filmed, the videos must go through an editing process before being finalized. The editing process can take several hours as well.
“We usually stay until 4:30 or 5:00 to make sure everything’s ready,” Aronoff said. “For the students putting in the effort, their experience with filming is part of a routine that helps sharpen skills and build confidence. Mr. Fairchild and I then spend about 2-3 hours each day overseeing filming and then editing the announcements ourselves.”
For seniors who want to be involved in the making of SNN, they must go through an audition process. In this process, students record videos of themselves, which are then assessed by Fairchild and Aronoff. To choose which 30 students of the 80-100 who audition, the sponsors observe the way the students act and speak in front of a camera.
“They should seem calm and comfortable in front of the camera, need to speak clearly, need to be able to project, which is tough because when you’re auditioning for something, you’re kind of nervous, and we try to keep that in mind,” Fairchild said. “But some kids just don’t look comfortable, and it’s tough. It’s hard to cut people because most of the people do well.”
While their ability to speak is important, Aronoff explains that how an individual can contribute to the process of filming is also a deciding factor. These expectations ensure that students who make it in are prepared to carry out all sorts of filming responsibilities. For students accepted into SNN, the time and effort they will be spending in SNN can bring personal growth.
“It’s exhausting but really fun,” Aronoff said. “That first week of training is full of mistakes, but you can feel the energy in the room. By the end of the semester, many crews have built real chemistry.”
Jonah Cooper ‘25, a former anchor, was one who experienced the chemistry of the SNN team that Aronoff brought up. Speaking from first-hand experience as a previous SNN cast member, Cooper also looked back on the program as a defining high school experience.
“One of us would need to look at all of the events going on and trim it down to be short enough to fit in the segment, and then would run the teleprompter,” Cooper said. “One person would be on the sound and one person would turn the camera on and off, hitting the fade button once the segment was done.”
Fairchild agrees with Cooper that being able to work as a cohesive team is vital in order to make the SNN experience the best it can be for all anchors. To make sure all anchors are comfortable with their group and the team of students on each day can work well together, Fairchild and Aronoff group people by their impressions of the students’ personalities.
“For someone who’s kind of quiet, seems a little more reserved, I don’t want to put them on the day where we had the Friday crew where they seem a little louder, and stuff,” Fairchild said. “The anchors all get along together and laugh. You can see it in the chemistry when they’re laughing about stuff on the announcements. It doesn’t always work out that way, but we really spend a lot of time trying to make sure that they would feel comfortable right from the start.”
Each role and person fits together to make the announcements students see every day. Along with having peers who he feels comfortable around, Cooper also found the sponsors—Aronoff and Fairchild—to be people who he enjoyed spending his time around.
While the nature of joining SNN was competitive, Cooper found himself surrounded by a supportive and engaging team.
“It was competitive: some people went in with a partner or you could get one assigned to you,” Cooper said. “[But] the culture is awesome, working with Mr. Aronoff and Mr. Fairchild, who are super funny and have interesting stories, always is quite a fun time. They both really care if the segment isn’t right.”
The experience of SNN can be one that heavily resides with the anchors. According to Fairchild, the program has influenced students to pursue future careers and college majors in broadcasting.
Along with the hands-on experience of being a news anchor, SNN also gives the anchors the opportunity to take their own spins on the skits. Having the role of the anchor means being able to decide the script and add jokes or phrases that bring their own personality to the segments.
“Sometimes they come up with their own catchphrases, like ‘Tubular Tuesday,’” Fairchild said. “We never tell them to do that—it’s just their creativity.”
For students like Birtig, who watch from their desks each morning, that creativity is part of what makes the broadcast memorable. Beyond the daily ads, Birtig also sees SNN as a part of the Stevenson community.
“It makes the school feel a little more connected,” Birtig said.
Other than the daily SNN videos played for the entire school, another news source made specifically for freshmen is the Advisory News Network (ANN). George Handal ’26 walks into the Patriot lobby to film the last scene for this week’s ANN video. As he prepares for filming, Handal picks up his props and thinks of the best way to present this skit. After coming up with a quirky, but funny idea, Handal and his group finalizes the script and picks up the camera, ready to film.
Ever since Handal’s freshman year at Stevenson, the Freshman Mentor Program (FMP) has been part of his high school experience, both through serving as an informative resource as well as a leadership activity he has wanted to be deeply involved in since his sophomore year. As the President of the FMP, Handal believes that ANN is a unique experience tailored for both FMP leaders and the freshmen.
“ANN is designed to give information that freshmen need,” Handal said. “We highlight clubs that freshmen can get involved in, so it’s really just aimed specifically to make the freshman experience better.”
Played once a week during advisory, ANN’s purpose is to help freshmen get to know Stevenson better and serves as reminders for special events. Although they are both announcements, to Lucas Spohn ’26, SNN and ANN tend to differ in purpose and reaction.
“ANN definitely does a good job at making students feel more involved,” Spohn said. “In the morning announcements, we have a freshman of the week, where one or two kids are given a highlight, which is a very fun experience. ”
While similar to SNN in regards to informing students about upcoming events, ANN goes in-depth about the Freshman specific events, such as the Freshman Mixer. As a freshman, Ashley Caruso ’29 sees ANN as a help guide for her first year of high school.
“I think ANN is a helpful way to provide information quickly and it’s a source where you can get to hear about a lot of upcoming events, which is helpful especially if you don’t have a good organization process,” Caruso said.
ANN can serve as a reminder for the weekly events for students like Caruso when they may be unaware of or tend to forget them. Behind these announcements, FMPs spend hours taking on tasks ranging from making scripts to editing. According to FMP Sarah Bende ’26, the process of making videos begins with gathering a list of information to present.
“We get to choose a script and what goes into it,” Bende said. “However, when it comes to club ads, those clubs have to have their sponsors approve it. And then our sponsor, Miss Stittman, has to approve that and then the ad can go in. Everything else is up to our creative freedom.”
These scripts are then used during the filming process of the ANN video. In order to create the content in these weekly videos, FMP has a specialized group of students responsible for curating each video.
“We spend 30-40 minutes going around the school creating different snippets for the information we want to hit each week,” Handal said. “Then the ANN team takes it home and they’ll edit the video on the computer rented from school. We have an ANN team for the year and then the anchors of each episode shift on a weekly basis.”
For the FMP mentors, Handal says that though ANN does not have a formal audition process, they look for students who are comfortable projecting themselves in front of 1500 freshmen. According to Spohn, students behind the cameras must also be able to decide what content will be included.
“From filming to editing, I’d probably say we take anywhere from an hour to two hours,” Spohn said. “We have a team of three and normally I am the one who edits, but that will switch off occasionally. We all make sure to do a little confirmation like yeah, we like it or no, we should switch something.”
The content chosen by Spohn and the ANN team will then be featured in the ANN video for the following week. In these videos, FMPs are featured in skits meant to make the announcements entertaining. Those who are featured on ANN are the ones who decide how to present the content.
“A lot of creative drive comes from the anchors of the week,” Handal said. “How the information is delivered and any extra information that we want to get added is really up to the discretion of the people running ANN this week, which is cool because each week is a little different based on who’s running it.”
FMP’s goal of communicating announcements through skits is to make ANN something some freshmen look forward to during advisory. To Caruso, the jokes and lighthearted energy ANN and FMP provide can help the freshmen adjust better to their new environment.
Along with building a community, ANN also introduces freshmen to the school grounds. In the announcements, FMPs walk the freshmen through different areas of Stevenson and the facilities it provides. By showing parts of Stevenson’s campus that freshmen may not have known about, this was what helped Elise Edgecomb ’29 find a study area she would be comfortable in.
“When ANN introduced the tutoring centers, they said, ‘oh, here’s somewhere you should be quiet.’ It helped me find a good place to study if I want to be quiet,” Edgecomb said.
For students like Edgecomb and Caruso, ANN serves a major role in helping them adjust to the new community of high school. Although some find ANN informative and fun, others, such as Phoenix Tunner-Harwell ’29, may see ANN as a redundant source due to the existence of SNN. For Tunner-Harwell, ANN tends to be boring and uninteresting, making it unappealing to watch.
“I pay attention to ANN, but it isn’t very interesting,” Tunner-Harrell said.
When watching ANN, students are often kept in their seats and watching a screen. Without the addition of an interactive element, ANN can become monotonous and boring for Tunner-Harwell. The questions over the importance of ANN are raised by others.
Despite the pushback from Tunner-Harwell, FMPs like Handal still understand ANN to be a way for underclassmen to feel more connected in a new environment. For Handal, the effort he put into his ANN video was met with cheerful interactions with the freshmen.
“Whether we were on the football field doing sock puppets or a funny skit, it was a really fun way for us to make the freshmen laugh,” Handal said. “Freshman come up to you and say ‘that was really cool,’ ‘you guys did a great job!’ It’s a way for freshmen to build a connection with FMPs they may not have had a real conversation with, and it’s another familiar face they see in the hallway.”