Explore five decades of Holmdel High School student journalism.
Archive note: This collection is still growing and does not yet include every issue of The Sting. Some historical issues have not been located, and additional materials will continue to be added as they become available.
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Search the Archives
Search through thousands of articles by keyword, author, or topic
Search note: The archive is incomplete and continues to improve. OCR, automated indexing, and AI-assisted processing may contain occasional errors or miss some articles, authors, names, or other information. Please refer to the original scanned issues when accuracy is important.
Browse by Keyword
Explore topics and subjects covered across all issues
🔤 0 unique keywords indexed. Keywords are generated through OCR and AI-assisted indexing and may contain errors, omissions, or duplicates. We are continuing to improve the accuracy of the archive; please refer to the original scanned issues when accuracy is important.
Browse by Author
Find articles written by The Sting staff across the archive
✍️ 0 authors indexed. Author names are extracted through OCR and AI-assisted processing and may be missing, duplicated, or incorrectly identified. We are continuing to improve the accuracy of the archive; please refer to the original scanned issues when accuracy is important.
Browse by People
Find articles mentioning students, teachers, and community members
👥 0 people mentioned in archives. Names are identified through OCR and AI-assisted processing and may be missing, duplicated, or incorrectly identified. We are continuing to improve the accuracy of the archive; please refer to the original scanned issues when accuracy is important.
ABOUT THE ARCHIVE
Preserving the History of Holmdel High School
The Sting Digital Archive makes five decades of student journalism searchable, bringing the past to life through student voices.
Origin
The project began in February 2025, when Andy Zhao, then a 10th-grade student and News Editor of The Sting, asked Holmdel High School librarian William Baronowsky to see old issues while looking for ideas to improve the newspaper. He found decades of aging copies, some yellowed with time, and was told to handle them carefully because they were the only copies left.
Realizing that much of The Sting’s history was both fragile and difficult for people to access, Andy decided to digitize the collection. He began by simply uploading PDFs, then started using modern AI tools to make the archive easily searchable and explorable online.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the Holmdel High School teachers and staff who supported the project, especially Mr. David Gurney and Mrs. Lynn Blustein, faculty advisors of The Sting; Mr. William Baronowsky, school librarian; and Dr. Michael-John Herits, Principal of Holmdel High School, for helping locate and provide access to historical issues and for supporting the development of the archive.
The project was supported by a grant from the Holmdel Foundation for Educational Excellence (HFEE), an organization that has supported educational enrichment and innovation in the Holmdel school district since 1996.
Andy would also like to thank his grandparents, whose stories about life in 20th-century China inspired his interest in history. Whenever they visited a new city, the first stop was often a secondhand bookstore, a family curiosity that eventually led him into the library to explore old copies of The Sting.
Help Us Improve
The archive is still a work in progress. Some historical issues have not yet been located, and older or lower-quality scans may contain OCR, indexing, article-segmentation, author-attribution, or other AI-assisted processing errors. As a result, searches may occasionally miss articles, misidentify authors or names, or display incomplete or inaccurate information.
We welcome help from community members. If you have missing issues of The Sting, notice an error, can provide additional information, or have technical expertise in text recognition, OCR, document processing, or newspaper article extraction, we would be grateful to hear from you.
Please contact Andy Zhao ’27 at andyzhaonj(at)gmail(dot)com with any questions, corrections, technical assistance, or materials that may help expand and improve the archive.
AI-generated text: This transcription may be incomplete or contain errors. The archive is still being improved, and corrections or suggestions are welcome. Please refer to the original PDF when accuracy matters.