Unknown to many at the school this website has become the tool for hundreds of students to publish their work, propagate news and most importantly to learn.

The Discoverer was created in 2016 to allow students to publish their work and show it to the community, allowing them to take pride in their work, as they inform the school community of everything going on.

“Project Based Learning is all about choice and voice, that you have more choice and more voice that other people can hear, and a newspaper is a perfect medium to make that come to life,” High School English Teacher Emily Butterworth said.

The Discoverer began in 2016 with students like Marco Duran, Camilo Gomez, and Mariana Badillo at its command.  Through the years it was shaped step by step by each student’s ideas on how to make it better.

Last year the students Tomas Sierra and Tomas Tobon focused on restructuring the website because, as they described it, things were not being done, and if they were, the quality was not consistent.

“Some Challenges we faced running the School newspaper was that it became Stagnant because most of the time there weren’t any stories and if there were people wouldn’t take the responsibility for writing the article,” 2021-2022 Chief Copy Editor Tomas Tobon said.

After all the challenges the students faced managing the newspaper, they said The Discoverer enhanced many abilities like Writing, speaking, and reading helping many students enter their dream universities.

“Being one of the chief copy editors definitely helped me with my university applications, one university especially had a very strong journalism career, it was a university in japan, and being in journalism definitely helped me get accepted with a scholarship,” Tobon said.

Last year was all about restructuring The Discoverer making it easier to use for the average journalist. This year’s Editor In Chief Ian Dominguez expressed his goals for the period 2022-2023 in journalism as he plans to make The Discoverer a more appealing platform in order to increase the number of viewers in the school.

“Our goal this year is to increase our viewer count and to make it more appealing for the people in general, or at least make it well known to everyone at school, so a big part of this year is going to be marketing and advertising,” Dominguez said.

This constitutes a challenge not only for the people writing the articles and promoting them but also for the people in charge of the newspaper itself.

The Discoverer is a student-run newspaper meaning students are also in charge of it, A handful of students are in charge of a total of 4 Journalism classes spanning a total of 70 students thru Journalism 2 and 3.

 Students such as Gabriel Meynard, Esteban Botero, and Maria del Mar Alvarez, Focus on revising articles, keeping people on the task, and adding subjects to the class curriculum. 

“I think what’s hard is that you are in charge of 200 people and you have to know what everyone is doing and the projects that are going on, and you have to be able to manage all of that, making sure the quality is what you want and that everything is being done as it should,” Dominguez said.

The Discoverer is a tool used by hundreds of students throughout High School as a way to showcase their work, present current news, and express their opinion to the Columbus School community. 

“We have students that are doing amazing work, they are doing amazing articles, they’re producing amazing podcasts,” David Gold, Journalism Teacher, said.

The Discoverer was created by English teachers  David Gold and  Emily Butterworth with administrative support from TCS Curriculum Coordination Britta McCarthy and Director of Learning Trisha Nikrandt.

It began as a way to expand the English department into 3 sections of English, AP, Nonfiction, and fiction. But the Discoverer grew from this initial purpose and became a newspaper to inform the community

“The secondary purpose of The Discoverer is to perform community service and that is to tell stories about the things that are going on in the school community, and the people in it that are doing exceptional things,” Gold said.

As the years passed the Discoverer created guidelines and a set of ideals that affects the way articles are written and what news is published, some of these guidelines include

 “The school’s administration does not review The Discoverer before publication, and the advisor will not act as a censor. Content represents the views of the student staff and not the school,” 2022-2023  Discoverer staff manual

To many, the Discoverer is more than just a newspaper, but is the means for student progress and the development of skills as they enter adulthood.

“The Discoverer and Journalism, in general, helped me with my university applications as well as becoming a better writer and a better speaker. It definitely helps if you are looking for experiences and learning about news as well as everything that is going on in the world,” Tobon said.