Sean Blanda

At Temple-News.com we have come a long way from our humble beginnings, and this semester we finally addressed a long overdue aspect of the site: a blog.

Running on Wordpress and the fabulous PressRow, Broad and Cecil is our catch-all our blog where the staff can post on anything Temple (or Philly) related. The reason the topic is so broad is to test the waters. While the whole staff has theories on what would make a good blog, we really won’t know until we check out the traffic and the comments. Most likely at the onset of next semester we will split into a few blogs. Blog content also gives us something to post on the front page of Temple-News.com everyday.

We also need to get a workflow established as well as work out some technical kinks. So we have established a one week dry run where we try to get at least 2-3 posts a day. However not many people will know the blog exists until Tuesday when we feature the blog in our print edition as well as run a heavy Facebook advertising campaign.

The goal is to add a Temple News property that is in the list of a student’s daily visited Web sites. Here at Temple University, we have one of the largest computer labs on the planet and when I stroll through and see what students are viewing, 50% of the time it is Facebook. We want to be on that list of sites that students visit went they sit down to procrastinate from doing work.

Advice for anyone else considering starting a blog for their business/news paper/organization: To keep a blog pumping with content you need the full support of the staff. People need to be engaged and excited to try something new. Otherwise they will simply think you are trying to spread them a little thinner. Luckily with the Temple News if every staff member only writes once a week, we can have a nice well of content.

So take a look!