Hernando High School’s Eye of the Tiger produces daily newscasts and aims to inform the community.

Kaylyn Lightfoot, a staff member of Eye of the Tiger, discusses how they delegate responsibilities on staff. The roles on staff change weekly.

“We have three executives that we go to in order to make sure everything is good and to see if there is anything to do, but really we all have a shared responsibility of looking out for each other and making sure we are all doing our jobs,” Kaylyn Lightfoot said. “Every Thursday, we pick roles for the next week and we switch every week. We encourage everyone to try every role at least once but we understand that people might be good at one thing more than another and that’s okay too.”

Emileigh Gomez, Executive Editor of Eye of the Tiger, explains all the work that goes into producing the daily episodes.

“To produce an episode, we have to write a script that has all the school recent events and any skits in our extra segments,” Emileigh Gomez said. “Then, we prepare to film the next day. We have two [assistant] editors that will edit [the] Weather in daily news and our extra segments that we have. Our main editor will edit our main anchors and put the entire episode together for me to watch through when it’s all done.”

Eye of the Tiger choses what to cover based on the community and starts with local stories.

“We look at what is going on around us and see what is inspiring us to make it a story. After that, we figure out what we need to do to make that story happen and eye-catching to the school” Gomez said.

Staff members are able to build memories while on the Eye of the Tiger. Lightfoot’s favorite memory is when they did skits for their fun episodes.

“My favorite memory is when we were doing the skits and extra segments for our fun episodes. It was lots of work but I had a good laugh when it was put all together,” Lightfoot said.

Students are able to gain life skills while on the Eye of the Tiger staff. Gomez wants to be a makeup artist in the film industry and gained skills that can be useful throughout her career.

“My dream career is to work in the film industry and do movie makeup,” Gomez said. “I took this class to learn how things can be on camera and how editing can also help. It’s really helped me understand the behind-the-scenes to put on an episode. I also got to practice doing some makeup for people in some of our PSAs or skits.”

The Eye of the Tiger staff learned a lot at the MSPA Spring Convention that they can apply to their shows.

“We have learned so much during MSPA that we can apply to ourselves as well as our shows. It’s just been a grest experience that we were allowed to have,” Lightfoot said.

“We hope to take what we’ve learned from other schools to make us better. There needs to be a lot more creativity and I think watching other school videos can give us inspiration on how to further make us better.”

Gomez was able to gain experiences while on the Eye of the Tiger staff and emphasizes the importance of media programs in high school.

“I’m so happy that we are able to have this type of experience in high school and now middle school,” Gomez said. “I really think it’s important for students to be able to express themselves in media and news and know what goes into it to see if they want to do it in the future. This class is a really great opportunity for a lot more than broadcast journalism and I love that.”

To keep up with Eye of the Tiger, you can follow them on Instagram at @eot_hhs. The staff will take over the MSPA Instagram on Friday, April 12 on the @MSPA_MS account!