Entrepreneur, 16, creates news organization
Like most students starting their final year of high school, Jessica Jin has a lot on her mind.
A senior at Carnegie Vanguard High School, the 16-year-old is making graduation plans, finishing up college applications, getting financial aid paperwork in order and wondering what her first year as a college freshman will be like.
She is also trying to secure the future of Rhino Press, a nonprofit student news organization the teenager started 1 1/2 years ago as an entrepreneurial venture.
Named for the high school’s mascot, the Rhino Press began as a one-person operation. It now has 150 staff members and attracts roughly 50,000 page views and 15,000 unique viewers.
“I come from a family of Chinese emigrants that were extremely poor,” Jin said. “For the longest time when my dad was getting his doctorate as a student in Hawaii and my mom was working, financial security was prioritized. That is important, but when I discovered the world of entrepreneurship, I learned it is not enough to be financially secure. It is important to thrive and do the things that I think matter to me.
“Entrepreneurship isn’t just the key to security. It opens up doors to abundance in everything.”
Jin is among America’s growing number of young entrepreneurs. According to a 2013 Gallup-Hope Index report, four in 10 students in the United States have plans to start a business or nonprofit organization. Slightly fewer than 38 percent indicated in the report that they will invent “something that changes the world.”
When Jin started out to create a student news publication at Carnegie Vanguard, she may not have had the world on her
scope, but her nonprofit venture is gaining worldwide participation. Entrepreneurship — creating a business and sharing its vision — is a passion Jin discovered she had as she created Rhino Press and marketed it to her peers and school administrators. When she graduates Carnegie Vanguard next spring, she hopes it will become her legacy at the campus.
“I want to pass it on to others to take over and to see other students engaged across Houston ISD campuses,” Jin said.
Finding out exactly what she wanted to do was a bit of a challenge, she said. She initially wanted to get involved in a student club at her high school, but she noticed the school didn’t have an active student publication. She then started brainstorming about ways to create her own student publication.
“I wanted to build something where students could come together to voice their opinions and share ideas,” she said.
She created a website and taught herself coding to give the site visual appeal. She wrote campus articles and polled her peers on their views. She didn’t have any journalism experience, either. Her high school has a creative writing class, but it doesn’t have a journalism program. Jin studied how articles were written by reading online news publications.
Soon after launching her venture, she began touting the publication to a few of her classmates who started helping out. She also took the idea to the school’s administration, whom she said was “really supportive of it.”
“They were fine with it,” she said. “They reimbursed me for the overhead, about $300.”
The publication now has a staff of journalists, editors and photographers, of which Jin is editor-in-chief.
She is part of the student organization’s 10-member leadership team that directs the publication. A teacher at the school serves as an adviser to the Rhino Press.
The online news portal reaches beyond the Web browsers of Carnegie Vanguard students and faculty.
Students from several Houston-area schools help produce the news website.
Some live in Washington, California and the United Kingdom.
Because of that, the publication doesn’t solely focus on what is happening at Carnegie Vanguard.
The staff reports on national politics, lifestyle trends, arts, entertainment, sports, technology and world events.
And now that the website is growing its student base across the Houston area, it is beginning to include news from other high schools in Houston ISD.
“It has definitely grown from an idea into a still growing news organization,” Jin said.
The first summer Rhino Press was in operation, students kept up with the World Cup soccer competition. The publication’s sports reporters covered every match.
“Their passion carried on by word-of-mouth, and social media inspired a lot of other students at my school and became a popular website for students to read,” she added.
Jin conducted an interview with Houston Mayor Annise Parker for the publication.
Lucas Pringle, Rhino Press’ U.K. correspondent, reported on Democrats running in the U.S. presidential primary election. In an Aug. 24 article, Pringle wrote about the hacking and fallout of adultery website Ashley Madison.
In addition to news and feature articles, Rhino Press publishes opinion pieces, something Jin said she felt was important to include from the beginning of the publication’s operations.
“Every teen has something to say, and they want to get their opinion voiced and not just through Facebook and Twitter,” Jin said.
The publication regularly conducts student polls on topics such as teenagers and sleep, study habits and the campus’ dress code.
The Rhino Press is looking for more contributors.
The website, www. rhinopress.org, has a “careers” link where high school students may apply for roles as journalists, copy editors, visual designers, photographers, social media interns and managers.
No experience is needed as Rhino Press offers a free interactive training program to help staff “master the fundamentals of digital journalism,” Jin said. And, of course, these are nonpaid positions.
Jin said the student news organization is developing regular training sessions this school year, and its leadership is hoping to have established journalists from news agencies come in and speak about their work. Jin said it is also important for leadership members to learn business skills to help manage the publication.
“That’s great,” said Tanya J. Hamilton, founder and executive director of Independent Youth, a nonprofit that works to educate teenagers nationwide on entrepreneurship.
The nonprofit offers workshops, conferences and on-campus programs focused on peer-to-peer mentorship with a network of teen entrepreneurs, some who have created multimillion-dollar companies and successful charitable programs.
“An entrepreneurial mindset is important because it allows kids to learn creative problemsolving, become more creative in their thought process, and learn and apply leadership skills,” Hamilton said.
She said schools are slowly beginning to understand the importance of teaching entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial mindset; “however, there are many more schools that still do not get it.”
Although Hamilton wasn’t familiar with Jin or the Rhino Press, she likes that the Carnegie Vanguard student was able to find something she was passionate about and get support from her campus administrators and teachers. If Hamilton had her way, schools nationwide would incorporate entrepreneurship courses into core curricula.
“Almost every classroom I go into there is a question from a student asking, ‘I’ve got this idea, but how do I get my parents to support me because they want me to drop it and focus on school work?’ ” Hamilton said. “There is an enormous interest among kids, but you have to educate their teachers and parents on this because they are not grasping the importance of it.”
Hamilton said some of the most creative people are America’s youth because they haven’t failed yet.
“They believe the sky is the limit,” she said. “They think big and a lot of times their ideas are larger than life. If they have a support network around them, it is a lot easier for them to start something.”