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What a start to badge season!

At the time of reporting, we’ve had nearly 450 badge submissions for the Distinguished Sites program and have already had seven schools earn Distinguished Site status for the 2025-2026 season! 🎉

In case you missed it, we’re now shouting out sites that have earned Distinguished Site status every Monday on our Facebook and Instagram pages, so be sure to follow along and help us recognize our Distinguished Sites throughout the year.

For those of you working away on badges (or maybe considering submitting your first one or two), we’ve put together the list below to share some general guidelines for each badge plus a few notes from our reviewers about common mistakes to avoid. Check it out!

(P.S. If video is more your style, we’ve got some here that you can view.)

Audience Engagement

Badge Description

This one’s pretty straightforward. Post to one of your social media accounts, which has at least 500 followers, for 20 consecutive weekdays. In addition, submit a screenshot of your website analytics that includes all necessary information.

Common Mistakes 

  • Not double checking that you have 20 consecutive weekdays of posts on your social media account in the timeframe you submit. You get to choose whatever timeframe you want our reviewers to check, but remember that the 20 weekdays must be consecutive regardless of whether or not you’re in school.
  • Submitting a screenshot of social media analytics rather than SNO Analytics. You can access your SNO Analytics from your dashboard.
  • Submitting an incomplete analytics screenshot. Make sure your screenshot clearly shows the number of unique visitors, number of stories read, the date range you’ve selected, and the y and x axis labels.

Story Page Excellence

Badge Description

This badge is a great opportunity to polish your story packaging using some of the different SNO publishing tools and template options. It will also require you to create an Infobox and a Long-Form format story.

Common Mistakes

  • Not having at least five segments in both the Infobox and Long-Form story.

  • Not including any inline images or SNO Story Elements to enhance your story packages. Make sure to include at least one!

  • Submitting a Long-Form story without any sort of multimedia or enhanced design options (like changing the segment background, adjusting segment format, etc.).

  • Not including the Infobox within a story. We’re looking for Infoboxes that supplement a story, not stand-alone content.

Continuous Coverage

Badge Description

In the days of print only, coverage was limited to publishing only when the next issue came out, but with a news website, you can post news as soon as it’s ready. With that in mind, this badge challenges you to expand your coverage mindset for online media. In part one, we’re looking for coverage of a single event and how it develops or changes over time. Part two focuses on turning around some quick coverage of school events. Finally, part three encourages publishing regularly to different categories on the site.

Common Mistakes

  • Not following the development of a single event over time. For instance, we receive a lot of submissions with three stories, each about a unique rule. Instead, follow one single rule and submit three stories about how it evolves or is received over time.

  • Submitting developing news or quick coverage stories from national or world news events. For this badge, we’re looking for coverage of your school and/or local community.

  • Gaps in sustained coverage. Make sure your sustained coverage categories are linked in your navigation menu and that you post at least one story per week. When we check this, our reviewers typically look at a week as being from Sunday through Saturday.

Site Excellence

Badge Description

The checklist format of this badge makes it look easy, but be prepared to spend some time on it. The badge includes 23 design, image and grammar guidelines that we expect all well-designed sites to meet. The biggest task is to significantly redesign your site via a Design Draft, demonstrating to our reviewers that your staff knows how to utilize our design and widget tools.

Common Mistakes

  • Submitting a homepage that contains content older than three months. This will likely get your submission sent back to you without further review, so make sure to double check that before submitting.

  • Submitting without a Design Draft, or submitting a Design Draft that is too close to the current live site design. We are looking for major structural changes across the header, footer and widget areas. You never need to push this Design Draft live (if you don’t want to), so really dig in!

  • Submitting stories that contain copyrighted images. Not only will this prevent you from getting the badge, but it may land you in legal trouble down the road. We’d strongly encourage your staff to watch this SPLC interview that goes over some of the common copyright issues we encounter.

Multimedia Badge

Badge Description

As the name suggests, this badge encourages your staff to create various types of multimedia content for your site – traditional broadcast videos, multi-host and/or interview-based podcasts and candid photo galleries. If you’re unfamiliar with multimedia journalism, you can check out lessons about it in the SNO curriculum to get started.

Common Mistakes

  • Videos that are not in the style we’re looking for. We’re looking for traditional broadcast news pieces, like you would see field reporters share on the local evening news, that cover a single topic through a combination of interviews and b-roll.

  • Podcast embeds that feature an episode preview rather than the full episode.

  • Photos taken from the same location. Make sure you’re moving around to take photos from a variety of distances, angles and photographer positions.

  • Photos that are primarily posed. One or two are okay, but our reviewers are looking for the photographer to go out and capture candid (unposed) action shots.

  • Any content created by non-staff members. For the multimedia badge, all content needs to be produced/created by student staff members who have a staff profile.

Best of SNO

Badge Description

We’ve sent out some previous newsletters about Best of SNO, but in the context of the Distinguished Site program, it is considered the Writing Excellence Badge. To earn it, you need one submission published to Best of SNO. Due to the high volume of submissions, we do not allow pieces to be resubmitted, and we cannot provide feedback on why an individual piece was not selected for Best of SNO.

Helpful Reminders

  • We receive a lot of submissions that don’t follow the guidelines. Make sure to double check those before you submit. A good place to look is on our Best of SNO Publication Tips page.

  • We’ve seen an uptick this year in sites submitting stories from which they are using quotes obtained from outside news outlets. For Best of SNO, our reviewers expect reporters to do their own interviews and get their own quotes.

  • Journalistic attribution is different from how you might cite things in your English class essays. For a reminder on how to attribute information, make sure to check out this lesson from the SNO curriculum.

As a final note, remember that all badge submissions are open through the end of May. It’s rare to earn a badge on the first try, so keep submitting! 💪