Web and Social Media
Website
Last year, we had issues with out website towards the start and ended up losing it by winter. Growing up in a tech-savvy household, this was a major concern of mine. As Editor In Chief, I am lucky that our adviser has empowered me to take charge and initiative of building a new website.
We searched for a new hosting platform and fell in love with SNO Sites. As I worked to develop a theme, palette and structure for the website, I needed some extra man-power. I opened up a position for website manager and after reading the applications and evaluating the task at hand, appointed two staff members.
Although I did almost all of the initial set-up and organization, our Website Managers, Kate Rood and Lucy Wilkins, have been beyond helpful through the process. Together, we have begun to load past stories and staff rosters into the website, adjusting layouts and colors as we go.
We sit together in weekly meetings, constantly refreshing tabs between our laptops to look at changes being made. Every week we add something new or try a recently-discovered feature out. Since the initial launch, we have added countdowns, embedded links, sports scores, social links and more to arlingtonian.com.
Arlingtonian collected over $10,000 through a donation fundraiser that was created in part as a celebration of the new launch, a push for community outreach and of course, to collect donations to help support printing and website hosting costs.
Since the launch of our website at the end of October, just under 2,000 pages have been viewed and 173 stories have been published.
My experience creating this website has been a true testament to the idea of “learning by doing,” and there was a LOT to do. Luckily, with the help of my dad, a website aficionado, some emails back-and-fourth with our school tech department, and the assistance of our website managers, our website is one of the best improvements Arlingtonian has seen this year.
Social Media
As a motivator of people and Editor In Chief, I learned a lot from this particular part of my job. Two multimedia editors were elected for this year in hopes that our online presence, apart from our website, would improve. In the past we have not had a steady or successful presence online and fall behind our broadcast counterparts, Kickin’ It Live (WARL), and even our spirit club, Bear Den.
I am the Social Network Chair for Student Council, and have had success building a new instagram platform this year. Instagram is the primary social media platform for Arlingtonian, so I knew what visions I had for the year.
I encouraged and pushed the editors to utilize our platform in various ways, pitching ideas and setting expectations. Arlingtonian also has YouTube and Twitter accounts, that have not been utilized in a few years. We also share a podcast with WARL that’s available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
We promote our “Missed Connections” section of printed issues on our Instagram Page a few times each issue and have links to our website the bio.
On distribution day, our Instagram Stories have teasers for the issue and we post the cover onto our main feed. Apart from this, there is not much contribution made on social media. This has been one of the only problems I feel I have had to face during my time as Editor In Chief.
As a leader, one of the biggest things I have learned in order to be successful is to delegate. Especially for me, it can be easy to become so wrapped up in ideas and excitement that I end up doing a lot myself. If I do everything myself, of course it will get done the way I want it to, but that shows no trust in the staff or allow them the opportunity to learn and grow. I have done my best not to hand-feed our editors and allow them the space and time to produce content, invigorating or not, for the publication. They posted a few ideas that had been brought up, but took no creative liberty or storytelling approaches.
Instagram Reel I pitched for the start of the year.
A huge takeaway from this experience for me is that sometimes we are only as good as the people we manage. I had higher hopes for student engagement and platform expansion, but we did not have the skill level and inclination that was expected from our multimedia editors this year. It has been a learning curve trying to address and attempt to resolve this lack of initiative and leadership.