When former Sports Editor Jesse Dougherty looked at dailyorange.com, he saw a great website that wasn’t being used to its fullest potential.

He realized photos captions were sometimes too long, or too short, for the web. Headlines weren’t catchy enough. Photos didn’t always accompany stories, and sometimes they weren’t cropped correctly for the web.

Dougherty felt creating a position in which someone would manage the website could alleviate these issues. He brought the idea to Editor in Chief Mara Corbett when she was applying for the job. The two decided the web position shouldn’t be limited just to maintenance, but should involve creating original content as well.

“Let’s make it focused on the quantity and the quality of the website process,” Dougherty said of the web team’s role. “We wanted to add and we wanted to make what we had better.”

As readers trade print newspapers for online subscriptions, Corbett and Dougherty wanted to create a culture similar to that of The New York Times, where editors don’t fight for the front page of the newspaper — but for the front page of the website.

So this past fall, Dougherty and Corbett started a web team, with a goal to raise the caliber of the website to match that of the print product. Each section had a web assistant who answered both to that section’s editor and to the web editor, a position that has since been renamed digital editor.

At every one of The Daily Orange’s meetings on Sunday, when the staff gets together, Dougherty, who served as web editor this past fall, would read off web statistics, discussing how the paper performed and how it should perform.

“We tried to build a new mindset at the paper, mining this digital-first mindset into the paper by getting younger people to sign on and do these jobs,” Dougherty said, “and then sending them off into the editorial staff where the hope is two, three years down the line, the print paper isn’t the primary focus because that’s the way the business is trending.”

At first, the role of web assistants was intentionally left undefined, Corbett said, so that they could develop theirs as they went. Some of the the job’s basic responsibilities included looking for stories in which an in-text photo could be used;  making sure that each article had a dominant photo with a caption;  and adding in all relevant hyperlinks.

Web assistants also worked with their sections to produce web-only content. News created weekly maps showing where crimes that had been committed on or near campus happened. Pulp curated playlists for various occasions throughout the semester, including finals week and the trip home for Thanksgiving Break. Sports added visual breakdowns to preview men’s basketball and football games, and a “what we learned” story as part of postgame coverage.

This spring, the digital editor role will also oversee video projects and social media, which previously operated independently. The goal is to create a more cohesive web effort.

“I’m not just focused on the way stories look on our website,” said this semester’s digital editor, Jon Mettus, who has helped to expand the role. “I’m also involved with planning our social media approaches.”

The web assistants, while still monitoring the aesthetics and functionality of stories, will begin to share more of those responsibilities with the editorial staff. That’s so they can become more engaged with the site, and the web staff  can spend more time on bigger projects.

Already, section editors have begun to use analytics to track the number of clicks and reads each week, getting a better idea of what content is drawing in readers. Web analytics give the staff a way to maximize their audience in a way that the print edition can’t.

Looking ahead, Corbett said The D.O. needs to look into what it can do to make the website friendlier for people reading on their phones. But some of the concerns that sparked the idea for a web team — captions, photos, headlines — are starting to dissipate.

The biggest stride so far has been getting the paper to think for the web more, not just the print edition.

“People are thinking about it. The paper used to be very print-oriented. People weren’t that concerned with the web content,” Corbett said. “The fact that everyone is thinking about it this semester is a huge step in the right direction.”

Published on January 17, 2016 at 9:21 pm

Contact Chris: cjlibona@syr.edu | @ChrisLibonati