The Insiders
-
Sep
1
Introducing: Insiders 2.0
Posted by: Alex Lougheed | September 1, 2009 | 7 Comments
Welcome!
After slaving away behind the scenes for three months now, we’re finally public. Introducing the brand-new UBC Insiders! Andrew, Justin, Neal and I have been working away behind the scenes, securing the new team, working on web development and coming up with a business strategy, editorial schedules and research ideas to give you what you want from UBC Insiders: the best coverage of UBC Vancouver political news and opinion.
With a new team comes a new mantra, and this is a team that wants you involved. You’ll notice we’ve ramped up the social media on the site, now hosted on UBC Blogs, allowing you the readers to connect to us in more ways than ever before. We now have twitter, as monitored by Neal and myself. We’ve relaxed the rules on guest posts so now you just need to convince one editor. We’re going to be reaching out to more interactive media: more video, audio and photo. We’ve also gone ahead and creative commons’d our content, so you can share it and remix it much more freely. Our hope is to allow communities that already exist to come in and feel like they can contribute.
We’re currently working on a lot of research projects–peering into the depths of the University, looking for stories you otherwise wouldn’t know were out there–while at the same time we’re working to keep you up to date on current events. The website is also still under works, while we figure out how to best deliver on some new crazy ideas we have to make UBC organizations more transparent. Expect coverage of the Board of Governors, Senates, UBC executive decisions, campus planning, student life, the new SUB project, and oh so much more.
So, browse the new site, try to break it, and send us feedback via comments, or through our contribute page. We’re super excited for the upcoming year as it’s a huge one for decisions like the NCAA, new SUB project and campus plan. We’ll let you know what’s actually going on, from as many perspectives as possible.
Love,
Your new UBC Insiders editorial team.
Comments
7 Comments so far
One concern I have is the lack of women on editorial. If you’re a well-informed, opinionated lady with good writing skills, we encourage you to submit a guest post and we’ll go from there!
Congratulations on the new website. It looks like you have some very informed writers who will continue to uncover the UBC that gets hidden from the public eye.
Doh. Comment eaten by recaptcha (for people using FF and NoScript, a warning that recaptcha.net should be permitted would help a lot. I had no idea that I wasn’t seeing the captcha, and my last comment got completely eaten.)
As anyone who read the old blog knows, the comments could get pretty heated. Do you have any thoughts or plans on how you’re going to balance open discussion and civility?
@Matt:
It’s not a question we’ve spoken about much. I personally take a very laissez-faire approach to internet comment moderation, but my coeditors may disagree. The best policing for civil debate is most often the community themselves. Ignore trolls, and they’ll go away. We do have a new neat functionality of restricting comments to those with CWL, which would then tie comments to CWL identities, but that’s not a lever I want to experiment with loosely.
Is there a scandalous story here about how you wrested control of the UBC Insiders from Maria Jogova?
Inquiring minds want to know.
wrested from Maria Jogova? uhhh….deposed emperor-for-life of the insiders here?
…anyway, despite my bitter fall, congrats on the insiders. The site looks nice, and best of luck with this new go-round.
[…] Insiders got some new editors and moved away from the dinosaur known as blogspot to these swanky new WordPress digs as part of UBC Blogs (back when it was a more exclusive club). It may have been slightly […]