BoM/TWS Message Forum

Grok tells me that there is no reliable national data for the US, but the data there is suggests only about 1/5 of schools have a student newspaper, and this percentage is in fairly fast decline. The percentage of schools that have daily video broadcasts is also impossible to estimate, but the percentage there is probably much smaller, due to expense.

I think the answer should be that WHS does NOT have any kind of newspaper or news operation, both because it is statistically unlikely and because it has not been mentioned before. Which is enough of a pity that I'll take suggestions for *something* like a news operation that is not an official news operation, and which plausibly might be enough under Will's radar that it hasn't been mentioned before.

BTW, I wish AI help had been around when I started writing this thing. It would have made it so much easier to build in foundational things like the presence (or absence) of school publications. Even now, it comes a little too late to answer questions like "How many sections of AP Statistics would a 1600-student high school likely offer." (The answer to this and similar questions implies that I've been shortstaffing WHS by about 60%!)

Of course, on the other hand, the coming of AI has also destroyed a lot of other assumptions about BoM and how it would work. There is no excuse now for the online translators to be so confusing with their translations of the Libra. And Will has NO excuse for not being able to come up with an item to put in the time capsule. The fact that in all the old chapters he struggles so hard instead of asking ChatGPT makes him look like a moron.

And, of course, if AI had been around all those years ago, we'd just be that much closer to being eaten by a sentient paperclip-making machine.