Mia Adduci

Date of Submission

5-6-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Advisor

Susan Campbell

Keywords

Charger Bulletin, Student News, Digital News, media consumption, student-run news, social media

LCSH

sh2006007023, sh2021006780, sh2019102310, sh85070784, sh85070780,

Abstract

Within the college setting, student-run news organizations are the mouthpiece delivering information to their community, and also a lens into the flow of information throughout it. The student news community serves as a bridge, existing somewhere between students and staff of the university to operate as an entity that showcases how information is received both formally and as a student. The delivery of this content heavily influences its consumption, and as a result, it is essential to ensure optimal upkeep of all platforms of journalistic media being managed within a news organization. At the University of New Haven, The Charger Bulletin has been the student-run news source since 1928, coming up on nearly a century of news production. The Bulletin’s online website, providing archives of published media at readers’ fingertips, was established in 2008, and its broadcast, Charger Bulletin News, first took to air in 2017. During the 2021-2022 academic year, our then-editor-in-chief redesigned the newspaper which the Bulletin prints weekly. With that in mind, there is no more optimal time to begin a redesign of the organization’s other platforms. In order to keep up with the pace of online media, it has now become a necessity to reimagine the online presence of the primary news organization for this campus. This dissertation will work to reupholster the Charger Bulletin's online presence, in order to gain more interactivity and increase online traffic, seeking to bring the Bulletin's online venues on par with the print version. This is being done with an understanding that technology will dictate the future of news consumption. The aim is also to create more diverse avenues of multimedia content. In order for this to be achieved, a set of actions will be taken to optimize the Bulletin’s flow of content beyond the pages of its weekly publication. There are two primary avenues of this project. The first consists of a massive redesign of chargerbulletin.com, meaning that it takes place both on the SEO backend – what the readers don’t see— and also on the end of its visual design and organization — what the readers do see. The social component consists of analyzing algorithms and current social media trends to develop a posting format and new visual design theme for the Instagram account @chargerbulletin, the news organization’s most interactive social platform. The isolation of this account comes with it being the only one currently not dormant – while the organization also has an account on X (formerly Twitter), it has historically gained nearly net-zero engagement in its posts, so for the purposes of this project, the Instagram is the organization’s only living platform, and it is on all fronts the only one with engagement from the student population.

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