Can We Get Some AU Love Here?
Russ Choma
Not all posts can be as long and involved as the last two, so this one will be fairly short, sweet and to the point. What do you have to do to get some love around here?
As noted in my earlier post we're hardly the only J-School graduate student Web publication, but we do appear to be the only one that can't get a link from our own school.
Seriously. AU's official SOC page has an entire page devoted to the Observer but not a link to the actual publication in sight. There's the goofy photo of us from the first week of school but no link to the online graduate student publication.
As an online publication, this is problematic.
Needless to say, there's also no link to the Transition Tracker Web site and it's amazing spinning wheel of federal agency badges (it's actually as thrilling as described, please do check it out) that several of us worked very hard on last semester.
On the "Student Work" page, there's a link to the undergraduate Eagle site, but nothing for this year's class of journalism grad students.
Maybe a project for the publicity person this time around?
Comments
Give love to get love
Short answer = The door is open for you to push content to the SOC site. I'm Tia, and my email is listed on the site sumler@american.edu. My job is to promote all things SOC with limited resources, so I can assure you it's way more likely that stuff you send will be posted than something I have to work to uncover. FYI - The Eagle staff has actually worked in this way with us, drafting content for us to post to promote their work, providing graphics, etc.
Addressing other issues:
In addition to the homepage spot in the left column - which moves up and down based on the timeliness of other left column content - we had included the Observer in our election coverage last fall and it was also mentioned in the inauguration wrap-up which has been the top news item on our homepage for the past two weeks.
We've updated the Journalism student work page with Inaug content
Transition Tracker was actually covered by the site so long ago, it's now buried at the bottom of page 2. The site in general, and the homepage in particular, are as dynamic as possible, which means a lot of churn. We'd be happy to do a follow-up story on it - and any suggestions of what to highlight or a quote about the project would be welcome.
The Observer page on the SOC site: We added a link to the publication. In the past the page had thumbnails and short Bios of all Observer staff linking to their work (provided to us by Observer staff), but in the absence of that, we went for a group shot. If you would prefer something else be posted, just send it over & we'll evaluate. Before you ask, I cannot make the link in the navigation simply redirect to the Observer site.
There's a link!
It's on the SOC front page, in the left sidebar, *cough* near the bottom.
Helpful
That's helpful, but it should still probably be easily found through the "student work" page and on the SOC's main Observer page itself, in the style of this. Or this, this and this.
I'm really not trying to be a pain, I just think that before we try and get our name/url out in the real world with flyers, stickers, and various other schwag, there's a lot that can be done putting our name out on the Web first. The Facebook page, and the sharing tools are good...
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