Before my tenure with the Mustang Daily is over, I want to work with the future online editor and developer (whom we’ll be hiring in the upcoming weeks) to acheive the following goals, most of which are relatively simple:
- Develop a better system for sending out the daily e-mail edition. We’re currently using feedburner, which we find to be inconsistent and ugly. We want something customizable that we can send out during times of breaking news. It will also include ad spots ($$$ = good!)
- Lay the foundations for a community wiki. The wiki will allow users to contribute information they have about on-going issues on campus, clubs, etc. I have no idea how it will be organized or the scope of our topics, but we’ll start with topics we’re covering, then expand to have a page for all clubs, organizations, administrators, etc.�
- Set up a community-generated calendar. Time and time again we get complaints from students about our lack of coverage on certain events. Everyone knows we can’t cover it all, though. But that doesn’t mean those events aren’t important. A community-generated calendar would be a resource for all students and a way for community members to promote themselves. Because it will surely be a populare page, it also means much advertising potential. (e.g. This calendar is sponsored by _____.)
- Create an easy system for submitting news tips. This could easily be done using a Google form (through Google docs) or a WordPress plugin. When setting this up, we could also do a form for submitting letters to the editor. �
- Make prettier landing pages. Although our front page is bomb (I’m not going to be modest
), our news, sports, opinion, arts and multimedia pages are boring as ever. Those pages were a quick fix when the site launched, but I want to redesign them to have a main, featured story and maybe a secondary story, then the rest listed below. It needs structure.�
- A page of aggregated tweets. Although it might be tough working with the Twitter API (thank goodness I’m hiring a web developer), it would be really cool to experiment with a page called “voices on the web” or “community tweets” (or probably something catchier) that agreggates tweets with the words “Cal Poly,” #calpoly, #poly, #slo, SLO, San Luis Obispo, etc.
And that’s just a start. If I can meet all these goals by the end of the summer, then I’ll start up a new list.
If you think of any ways these ideas can be better, let me know! My summer starts June 12. Let the fun begin!
Tags: cal poly, goals, mustang daily
You might want to be careful incorporating a Twitter stream into your page. Things can get out of hand quickly, don’t forget the Skittles experiment.
I really like all of your UGC ideas for this!
Have you thought of doing something more about news tips? Maybe a way for people to submit tips via SMS? Breaking news often happens away from a computer — and not everyone has an iPhone or BlackBerry!
Also, let me know what you end up doing for the e-mail edition. As The Eagle moves off of CP, we’ll have to rethink this one. Right now we’re considering creating a template through our new CMS to put everything from each issue into an HTML page. We would copy source and then dump that into a mailer like PHPList.
College media really needs an awesome e-mail edition WP plugin. The Hurricane’s webmaster bought one that has since been discontinued because it didn’t work properly, but he was able to hack it to our needs.
I’m really interested to see what you use for the community calendar. Google Cal is the first that comes to mind, but it’s not the best for community contributions. Check these out:
http://mashable.com/2007/10/08/online-calendar-toolbox
There’s a popular WP plugin called MailPress: http://www.mailpress.org/ If your newly hired web developer has WP theme/template experience, it’s fully customizable.