Web and Social Media
Web design
One luxury of leading a historically successful paper is that there are a lot of things already done for you: our website is easy to navigate and well designed because of the work of past editors, so there was very little work left for me to do to improve our website. Most of what I've done for our website as Editor-in-Chief was to clean up the subcategories at the top of our website. I cut the old and unused ones, made some of the names a little clearer, but for the most part, the work was already done for me. There are two things this year, though, that I belive made our website better.
Story design
For most of the history of the Central Times, our website has been a repository for the stories that we run in print: the stories were mostly copy-and-pasted blocks of text, with no thought given as to how to make them look better or be more readable online. I don't claim to have completely fixed this problem, but simply by teaching our editors how to use our website's pull out quote and embed features, our long stories have gotten a lot easier to look at on the web.
It's a small change, but I believe it has improved the experience of a lot of our readers.
Column pages
Since columns are written by only one person, I thought the column page on our website should show off both the writing and the person behind it. For that reason, I built this page, which explains the guiding point of the column, tells you about the columnist and shows you their face. This is another small change, but I think it does a good job showing off the "why" and the person behind our monthly columns.
Social Media
Our publication has two primary social media accounts: Instagram and X (formerly known as twitter). As Editor-in-Chief, I haven't done all that much to change how we use these accounts - we still promote our stories and still post breaking news, but there is one thing I felt strongly about implementing this year: issue previews.
Issue previews
For just about every month this year, we've posted a print issue preview, designed both to inform students that our issue has come out and to encourage them to check them out. I think these are a great way to boost readership and to get people excited about reading our paper, so I'm very happy that I made it a point at the start of this year to make these previews.
Find an example here.
X account management
I run our X (Twitter) account, and this year I've been mostly using it to post breaking news and to publicize the big stories that we report.Â
I am proud of the way this is run, as I believe it both serves to update our community of followers and to funnel them to our website via links to out content.
Find our X account here.
Editor X account
Every member of the Central Times has a CT X account. Nothing particularly special happens here, but I do use it, so the story of my social media use would be incomplete without it.
Find my X account here.