The strange and wonderful world of online journalism

Every year we have a new website for the Gazette. Even though online journalism is becoming more and more important, we’ve been slow, like many campus publications, to really adapt ourselves to the Internet.

This year, that changed. After a lot of hard work we relaunched our website in the fall, and all year we’ve been posting on and plugging dalgazette.com whenever we can. We’re pretty proud of it: it’s got extra, exclusive content, it’s attractively designed and easy to use. Most importantly, it exists, it’s updated, and with some maintenance here and there, it works.

So we feel we’re entitled to a little pride, and we’ll be working hard next year to take full advantage of our online presence with more day-to-day news that you need to know. This year we covered the Occupy NS movement, the Atlantic Film Festival, the faculty strike negotiations and the CIS Final 8 basketball tournament almost entirely online. We’ll be looking to bring you more of the same and then some next year.

But we are also looking for feedback. Maintaining and running an online news site is not easy, and online journalism is constantly evolving. We’d love to hear your ideas for how to best make use of our site.

What kind of content do you want to see? How often? More importantly, how do you check dalgazette.com—on your phone, iPad, desktop? All these things are important to how we cover our campus.

There is one other request we have for you, too. Part of our web re-design involved the long-planned Gazette graveyard, a highly spooky place where we store all the articles from past years.

Sadly, our previous websites were sometimes positively skeletal. We salvaged a lot of material. Think 40,000 pages of material. For that, we had about 30 photos, despite the fact that the Gazette has long had very talented photographers.

Our archive is also largely restricted to the past two years, and there are holes in that coverage, too—so it’s best to check even if you have written for us before. Our archiving is never quite as good as it should be, so we are asking for your help. Check out the sidebar to see how you can be immortalized forever in our archives. Even better, it’s an excellent way to fill out the increasingly popular online C.V., which looks real good when presented to an employer.

If you have questions or comments—or just great ideas—about our website and how we can adapt ourselves to the age of the Internet, please email us at editor@dalgazette.com.

We want to help keep Dalhousie’s history intact online, and we hope you can help.

Happy surfing and searching!

How-to magically appear in the Gazette archive

 A six-step solution for articles and comics

1. If you wrote for us in the past, go to our website and search your name. If your story shows up, check to see if anything is missing. If it doesn’t, we probably don’t have it, or the version we do have is corrupted. If you still have a copy, we’d love to add it.
2. If you have the photos for the story, send those in too.
3. For text, send us the article with as much information as possible. Include the date it was published, the year and any headline or other info you have.
4. File types: .rtf and .doc are best, thanks. Google Docs is alright, too.
5. Send photos in a manageable file format. We like jpegs (.jpg). We like them a lot. Avoid .tiff or other massive types unless it’s the only type you have. Flickr links are fine. If it had a caption or if you remember what the photo is of, this is helpful information to include.
6. Email to archives@dalgazette.com.

And how to do it if you were a photographer

1. If you took photos for any story, first search that story and see if your photo made it up.
2. If you don’t know which story your photo went with, let us know the date you took it and the issue number if you have it (143-02 or some such, usually on the cover of the paper).
3. Send photos in a manageable file format. We like jpegs (.jpg). We like them a lot. Avoid .tiff or other massive types unless it’s the only type you have. Flickr links are fine. If it had a caption or if you remember what the photo is of, this is helpful information to include.
4. Email to archives@dalgazette.com.

Please be patient—these things take time and people. Thanks, the Gazette website team.