Early Observations

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As I mentioned in my last post, I just got hired for my school's online editor position. A very good suggestion was made to keep up a blog on my experience, as a guide to help others unsure of how to go about being a journalist in the online realm, and to help me work out my ideas, frustrations, things that worked and those that didn't, etc.

Eventually I'll move it onto it's own platform/my website (as of right now, it's the very bare bones minimum of what it could be). But until then I'll keep my experiences here.

Spring quarter doesn't start for another two weeks yet, so I have some time before I take on westernfrontonline.net. However, just as some early research I began looking at some other college websites. A quick search on top online college websites brought me a top 10 list I began searching through. Very quickly I noticed several trends that all these websites had that ours lacks:

1. Some sort of poll/quiz widget, or some other short, interactive element.
2. A blog listing
3. A box with an updated list of job opportunities/forums
4. Twitter (In fact I looked at the Daily Texan's twitter, and I noticed they talked to their followers in addition to just posting updates)
5. A (visible) RSS feed. (I mention that because we have one, but it took me a second to be able to find it. However, with these other sites, they made the button very visible, easy for a reader to spot upon initial glance of the page. If I can figure out a way to test this it would be interesting to find out if we made a more visible RSS button, would more people subscribe...?)
6. More video and a spot for videos on the front page.

I would have to do more research into how I could get these things going for our site, however it would be interesting to see if these few things would increase the readership on our site. Like I said, this was just initial research/observation, but very interesting indeed.

If you have any other ideas/observations/thoughts about what might work help out a small college newspaper let me know!

Next task: Figure out how on earth previous editors promoted our paper without people thinking we were some sort of war magazine.