This week, a long running dream of mine finally comes true: The Free Press gets a brand new website.
Over the past few months, the Free Press staff has been planning the launch of the new site, which should be online by Friday. When I became the editor, my first priority was to overhaul our tired page design, which hasn’t changed in years.
Getting the new site online was a big deal for me. With advertising revenue dropping for almost every newspaper, the printed word has become increasingly expensive to produce. Papers around the country are shifting resources into developing dynamic websites constantly updated with breaking news and multimedia.
I feel our duty as a college paper is to be at the forefront of that revolution. We are the ones who can take risks others can’t. We’re small and nimble enough to make drastic changes to our design and experiment with new technologies that older, more established papers won’t. College students have been using social media since grade school; we’re better acquainted than larger papers that have only recently jumped on board.
Besides looking cool, the new site allows us to do more on each page of the site. Our previous site was hosted by College Publisher — a subsidiary of Viacom that specializes in cookie cutter websites that are difficult to customize. Their service is free, but the cost is a page cluttered with national ads we don’t get paid for. We would have gotten the new site online earlier, but College Publisher makes you wait three months when you cancel your contract before they release the archived stories.
With our new site, we want to build a network where USM students can go everyday to find new stories and listen to new music. Our Perspectives page will feature links to blogs by USM students and faculty. Our A&E page will feature slide shows of student art and have an embedded MP3 player featuring songs by local artists. A mobile version of the site will soon be available for those of you with smartphones.
But we can’t do this alone. We need students and faculty who blog to get in touch with us to be featured on the site. We need people who know how to shoot and edit video and design Flash to help produce exclusive content for the website. We need local bands who want their music heard to send us CDs and MP3s. We also need people who know how to code to help make the whole operation work.
I envision the new site as a place where USM students can interact and be part of the news we cover; a place where there’s new things to read and experience every day — a repository of all the amazing things USM students do in and out of the classroom. I want the website to be a portal into the real lives of students. Editors will still curate the content, and the normal editorial guidelines will apply, of course, but there will always be a space on the site (and in the physical paper) for student voices.
So click around and explore. The Free Press is your newspaper; let us know what works and what doesn’t.