About

The Southwest Shadow was founded January 2010 and strives to provide an accessible news source for students, parents and the outlying community of Las Vegas. We are proud members of NSPA, JEA, CSPA, and Quill & Scroll.

The mission of the Southwest Shadow is simple: Post news that is relevant to our school and local community. If it is not relevant, then we are not accomplishing our goals.

The Southwest Shadow makes every effort to publish new content daily, except during Winter Break (December 24 – January 4), during review week and semester exams (January 7-18) and Spring Break (March 24-30). The final postings for the 2012-2013 school year will be May 20th.

The staff of 25 produces the Southwest Shadow online news site and also designs and compiles the 240-page Southwest Howl Yearbook. The class is a combination class of Journalism I and Journalism II and meets every other day for 85 minutes.

In June 2012, the editorial board decided to move to a new WordPress theme. Unfortunately, the move resulted in the loss of several stories, photos and media pieces from our archives. The staff was able to recover some of the archived pieces and restore them as closely as possible to their original published state, but not all of them. The site crashed again in the mid-September and progress was halted. It was rectified and the site has been fully operational since the beginning of November.

Additionally, in August 2012, an experiment in convergence between the Broadcast Journalism students, advised by Mr. Tom Rizzo, and the Journalism II students, advised by Mr. Matthew LaPorte, began. The goal of this partnership is to create and share content to better educate and inform our community. We believe that this partnership will only better the role of journalism at our school.

Also, because our school is a Career and Technical Academy, we do not have NCAA sanctioned sports. Therefore, we have chosen to allow sports to be covered in-depth by the local city newspapers who have the resources and manpower to visit the outlying comprehensive high schools with those programs.