Newspaper hopes to expand online content, fix Web woes
The Daily Gamecock has launched a new website that editors and site designers say will allow the newspaper to expand its multimedia coverage at a time when Internet news is increasingly relevant.
Content will still be accessible at dailygamecock.com.
“I think this website will definitely launch us forward even more into competing with the likes of the nation’s top college newspapers,” Editor-in-Chief Kristyn Sanito said.
Easier navigation, more modern aesthetics and subdivided content sections are noticeable features of the new site. In addition, the website support system includes increased server space, which should eliminate the sluggish load times and crashes of the old website, according to Austin Price, the online editor.
The new site allows the newspaper to offer extended multimedia coverage like videos, audio content and photo slide shows that the previous website was less capable of handling.
“The news industry in general is moving toward multimedia and Web-based content,” Price said. “With our old website, we were really slacking with that because we pretty much just put our printed stories online. It was a pretty outdated website.
“The way that … most people that are in college read the news is online. And the fact that we have the printed edition around campus makes it pretty easy to pick up and read in class. But we want to give people more content when they visit our website than they can find in the paper and give them a reason to go there.”
Price said the site design process began just before winter break. He and others involved in the site design looked at major national newspapers’ and college newspapers’ websites to help model the new site after, Price said.
The new website is operated on the Gryphon Content Management System, a product of SN Works, a website development group at Michigan State University’s The State News student newspaper.
The new system will cost The Daily Gamecock $8,000 this year to launch the site and run it for a year, Director of Student Media Scott Lindenberg said. It’ll cost $5,100 per year after that.
The paper had spent about $81 per year for server space on its old Joomla system, Lindenberg said.
The Daily Gamecock moved to Joomla in 2010, according to Price, and now joins a number of other college newspapers across the country, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Daily Tar Heel and the University of Pennsylvania’s Daily Pennsylvanian on Gryphon.
“We’ve got an impressive print product,” Sanito said. “So now I think this website will finally match all of what we put into the printed product that people pick up every day.”