Who I Am
For Arthur I have contributed for the past three years to the business, academics, science, life, arts, local, national, international, campus, and politics sections respectively. I even wrote for the short-lived Trent Radio section. Before my time with Arthur I worked as Trent Radio’s Studio B Trainer, then reported for Trent Radio as the Summer Events Intern Correspondent. Throughout my work with Trent’s student media I have built strong relationships all across campus and in the community, with clubs, groups, staff, and administration.
I have been on the ground and around reporting long enough that I have been able to write for a variety of sections while still doing first-person research (interviews, reviewing bylaws, laws, policy,) in order to construct easy-to-read, engaging narratives, composed of verifiable information provided by active engagement. This is the sort of reporting that I’ll be encouraging and this is the sort of reporting my story ideas foster.
Proposed Staffing Model
My proposed staffing model is to ensure volunteer support and contribution, growing and strengthening the Staff Collective while developing staff to become future leaders. There will be weekly Story Meetings for those organizing content to share ideas and leads as well as weekly Production Meetings for those organizing the design and layout of the paper’s content. Skill Development Seminars are at the beginning of these meetings and involve a guest or the Editor or Production Manager going over some interesting ways to improve everybody’s skills.
With the implementation of the previously successful strategy of having Section Editors, more staff will be actively looking for story ideas and encouraging volunteer contributions. Instead of having Arthur staff attempt to represent certain communities, the emphasis will be on staff facilitating communities representing themselves.
In addition to Section Editors providing content for the paper, there will be staff that produce content exclusively for the website; an Audio Technician and a Videographer. An overlap will occur with the Head of Photography and Illustrator, creating and obtaining content for the web and newspaper. The staffing model is meant to be a balance between always having guaranteed content each week and soliciting volunteer contributions.
Community Building
We need to expand the content of the paper to include contributions from Oshawa and Fleming in order to help build a sense of a common student movement in the area and have our community include more communities. This can easily be accomplished by distributing to Oshawa and Fleming as well as hiring Section Editors in those locations. The paper itself would have a specific Oshawa and Fleming section with one article each, but the website would host all the content these communities care to offer. The distribution of the paper should reflect the priorities of the paper; most papers being distributed at the Nassau Mills campus, then Traill/PR/TRadio, then downtown, then Fleming and Oshawa. The distribution of web content is unlimited though, so no content will go unread/unheard/unseen.
Writers want readers, speakers want listeners, filmmakers want viewers, event hosts want participants. This is what Arthur has that no other campus publication has and rivals even the university’s news feed, an audience. Students and community members pay attention to what is in Arthur. I’m used to Trent Radio where nobody is listening and nobody cares, but at Arthur, everybody is reading and everybody seems to care. So we need to be connecting content producers with this already engaged audience.
Social Media Strategy
When it comes to the paper, this is true, but online the engagement needs to be strategic and unrelenting. The older Trent gets, the more alumni there are and alumni are interested in what students are doing at their alma mater. With Volume 48 occurring during Trent’s 50th Anniversary, Trent’s alumni are going to be thinking about their school much more and wondering how it is now.
This represents a large readership that wants to be engaged and the only way to do that is by continuing to improve Arthur’s Social Media Strategy. Social Media is still new and it’s potential for communicating and engaging with an audience far gone (in time [alumni] and space [other campuses]) is still being explored.
I have not only studied media through Trent’s Media Studies programme and written numerous articles about new media, but I also contributed samples of effectively written blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts for the business communications textbook Successful Business Communications: Bridging the Gap by Deborah Luchuk published through Oxford University Press. It is with this continued interest and depth of experience that I will formulate Arthur’s Social Media Strategy with the Web Manager, an immediately implementable document that can be passed on from editorship to editorship and built upon as the technology advances.
In the words of Groucho Marx, ‘These are my principles, if you don’t like them, I have others.’
