About Us

The Central Focus and FHCtoday.com are award-winning student news publications produced at Francis Howell Central High School in St. Charles, Mo. The Central Focus began as a simple editorial which has evolved over 15 years of production into two successful scholastic press publications.

Only recently have the publications gained significant headway. Originally a simple black and white newspaper, in 2007 the paper was developed into a 28 page color newsmagazine. The primitive version of the Central Focus Podcast was also introduced that year. The next year, minor alterations were incorporated in both the paper and the podcast; the idea of a website was also proposed, though did not gain significant traction. 2009 brought the addition of FHCtoday.com and the rebranded podcast, iFocus. This breakthrough in multimedia has redefined how the Central Focus operates: now, not merely a newspaper, but a news production.

FHCtoday.com was born out of the desire to better connect with the school, its students and its staff. Per its mission statement, it allows the Central Focus to “deliver news in a timely manner, showcase much more content, inform students of school and community events, maintain a more comprehensive coverage of our sports teams and generally keep people up to date with what’s going on at Francis Howell Central High School today.”

The staff concentrates its efforts to filling its monthly newspaper with in-depth articles while maintaining more timely and supplementary content on the website. It also aims to connect with readers through social networking and other direct forms of communication in order to closely intertwine the publication with the school and the events and people it covers.

The Central Focus and FHCtoday.com are both completely free to readers. They rely on the support of advertisers, donations and funraising efforts by the staff to cover publishing costs. No money is received from the school for publishing costs. The student staff is esentially responsible for generating the content to be published, content decision, the publications’ layout and design and publishing costs. A single 24 member staff is responsible for both the newspaper and website, though all content published is unique to each publication. While digital copies of the paper can be found in the “Print” section of FHCtoday.com, no where else will you ever find duplicate content.