All By Ourselves
We want you.
Yes, you sitting at your computer reading this highly esteemed blog post by yours truly. If you have a computer, are reading this blog and have even an ounce of enthusiasm for what you are reading, you're already half way there on the train to becoming an ATVN web master!
Managing the ATVN web page is a lot of things. Easy isn't one of them. But it could be if we had glorious people like you helping out.
Before I go on, I must note that Monday's afternoon web crew is one of superstar status. Led by veterans Nick and Princeton, I know I can count on solid content to get up by the end of the afternoon.
However, our mornings are bleak. On days when I'm web and graphics teammate, we have a serious problem. I have to leave my shift for an hour and a half class. During that time period, no one is working on the web. If a meteor were to crash into the Earth, we couldn't let our faithful Twitter and Facebook followers know. If N'Sync announced they were getting back together for a one time reunion of singing "Bye Bye Bye" at 10 a.m. on a Monday, we would have no one to make an ever-important photo slide show of Justin Timberlake's greatest fashion choices from the 90's.
As web teammate, this is incredibly frustrating because our main goal is to produce as much content as possible throughout the day. If we don't have a single story up before noon, we are already way behind the rest of the web world, and it becomes a constant game of playing catchup. As we strive to establish our presence in online journalism, this lack of content can be detrimental to our web traffic.
Our other issue with the web is focusing on original reporting. Our most popular stories tend to deal with USC because these are the stories where we provide new information that our followers tend to be most interested in. We need to continue to strive to not just regurgitate wire stories, but instead, to search for our own unique angles.
Now I know the jungle of the web may seem intimidating, especially with our small staff. But, that's why now is the perfect time for you to sign up. We may be small and mighty now, but just think of the internet power we could achieve if we had a few more hands on deck.
To entice you, just think of all the clips you can gather for your journalism portfolio. Sometimes I even bring Girl Scout cookies into the newsroom on Monday mornings. Just imagine a morning filled with Thin Mints, Diet Coke from the Annenberg Coffee Cart and the wonderful world wide web. If that doesn't sound like perfect morning conditions, you clearly haven't lived.
But seriously, come work web. You'd make a lot of people incredibly happy and earn a ton of karma points. And who doesn't love karma points?
