Hey, all you ship pun lovers. If you haven’t done so yet, check out Keeley’s post right below this one to learn more about the purpose of this blog and to figure out why the heck it’s called The Ballast. If you’re too lazy for that, the gist of it is that a crow’s nest is at the top of the ship and a ballast is at the bottom. Tricksy, huh?
My name is Ren LaForme, straight from the mean streets of Buffalo, N.Y., and I’ll be serving double duty as your editorial page editor and online editor for the next two semesters. My official position is online editor, but I’ve volunteered to run the paper’s new editorial page to give it some extra oomph. I’m hoping that USF St. Pete faculty, staff and students will pick up the paper every week and turn right to page 7 to check out the paper’s opinion on the world around them.
You could say that I’m not exactly a newbie when it comes to student publications. I put in two years at the University at Buffalo’s student newspaper, The Spectrum, starting out as a staff writer and working my way up to assistant news editor, then senior news editor, then senior managing editor. From there, I jumped ship (ha!) to another publication at the school called Generation Magazine. That was both a success and a failure in my eyes. I was given the opportunity to revamp the magazine into something completely new, but the final product left the student body largely polarized. I ultimately learned some major lessons and would do it all again if I could, but in a much different way.
I am very excited to apply those lessons working with Keeley at The Crow’s Nest this year. We’ve been working hard all summer to make some great changes to the paper that I think you all will like. I’ll run you through some of the things I’ve done so far, mostly during my free time at night and on the weekends:
New Website
The print product, which is our bread and butter, is getting a very fresh, new design. We decided our website needed to be updated to act as a companion to that product. It’s going to have some similarities to the paper, but have its own look and feel to set it apart.
Expect to see a cleaner site with a greater focus on images to accentuate our stories. We’ll be offering full social networking options and an integrated Twitter and Facebook feed that will manage to be both visible and out of the way. Last but certainly not least, there will be more prime spots for our advertisers to sell their products and services online. Watch for our ad sheet this fall to learn more about how you can advertise on our website.
Unfortunately, the site is running in test mode on a private server right now, and I can’t offer you a timeline for when it will go live. But you can bet it will be ready before we release our first issue on August 22.
New Logo
If you’ve been to our Facebook or Twitter pages recently, you’ve seen our new Web logo. He’s a crow, who we have aptly named “Petey”. Petey was a joint effort between me and Tara McCarty, our creative director. We were working together in an attempt to create a logo for our Facebook and Twitter pages, and I sort of stumbled upon Petey during the process. I made an extremely rough version of him, which Tara promptly took and shaped into the beautiful bird he turned out to be.
Social Networking Campaign
If you head over to our soon-to-be old site, you’ll notice we’re running a special campaign to earn new friends on Facebook and Twitter, and to get the USFSP community involved in our rebranding process. We’re giving the community the opportunity to come up with our new slogan, and offering them a $25 gift card to the Tavern on campus and a write-up in the paper in return.
Two days in, we’ve seen an incredible amount of buzz. While we’ve only received a handful of slogan ideas, traffic increases to the website and our Facebook page have been immense. Post views on Facebook are up 640 percent and our active monthly users are up a whopping 916 percent. Thanks for stopping in, everybody! Come up with some quality slogans and you could be a part of Crow’s Nest history.
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Those are just a few of the great new projects we’ve been working on at The Crow’s Nest. We are all very excited to come back this summer with a bigger, better newspaper that brings you the best news at USFSP. Keep watching this page for updates and insights into the future of The Crow’s Nest.