This year, the Hershey Broadcaster reached 100 years of publishing student-written journalism for Hershey High School. Since 1926, the Broadcaster has undergone many changes, but its core mission has remained the same: to be the voice of the school.

At its conception, the Broadcaster was a club. The English Department selected the best student writers and invited them to join. The Broadcaster was originally more like a newsletter than a newspaper, featuring public notices and short literary pieces. By 1928, the Broadcaster changed from being mimeographed on standard typing paper to being printed in a more standard newspaper form.

In 1942, the Broadcaster was integrated into the school curriculum. At that time, both Hershey High School and the Hershey Vocational School were located in the Hershey Junior-Senior High School building behind the Hershey Theatre.

Stories for the Broadcaster would be handwritten by journalism students and sent to the typing class to be typed up by students, mostly girls preparing for secretarial work. The typewritten papers would then be sent to the print class, where vocational school students would lay out and print the paper.

In 2015, the Broadcaster went fully online. The first website was built on WordPress, with many technical difficulties. Today, the Broadcaster uses an SNO Flex site, which allows for easier layout.

Robert Sterner, a Hershey High School English teacher and the current Broadcaster advisor, is optimistic about the paper’s future, despite concerns about a decline in student interest.

Some of Sterner’s future plans include starting a video production class, integrating the Broadcaster into the morning announcements, and continuing to digitize the paper’s old print editions.

Sterner said, “I don’t want to be the seventeenth and last advisor of the Broadcaster. There’s gotta be a way to make it work, make it interesting and relevant to students.”

For students, the Broadcaster continues as a source of information and a space for connection. Gavin Zeigler, a senior in Journalism I, said, “It’s a voice of the students because it’s by the students.”