Thanks to the NUS's Media Mailing list thingbob (one of their best-kept secrets), I've just found out about Palatinate, the online version of Durham University SU's fortnightly student newspaper.

Their website comes across much like I imagine UPSU.net does - a rapidly-evolving work of love by one or two hard-working HTML-geeks, and the results show (I admit I'm guessing about the webteam here, but the site feels a lot like someone's put a lot of work into it, and is perhaps still tweaking things as they go along...).

More importantly, the content is rich and diverse, ranging from features on the Union's clubs and societies (complete with pictures of Beautiful People™, of course ;o) through to the not-too-Geek-orientated weekly online news roundup (Facebook doing instant messaging? Srsly?!). In fact, revisiting the website to get the link to the Facebook article, I notice that they have a whole "online" section - not an entirely crazy idea, I suspect.

The content is also easily accessible (although the online front page appears to have a heavy bias towards comment which might just be down to layout tweaking than a lack of news-based content, it seems) and - yey! - they're using JonDesign's Smoothgallery (which I've gushed about previously) to rotate the top three news stories.

Very nice, and definitely worth subscribing to their RSS feed.

/al

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Nice Paper. 
 
Would be nice to see more of our content heading that way, although i am still a firm believer that our media is some of the best in the UK. 
 
Would be nice to see the UPSU website reflecting the newspaper layout if that makes sense and a seperation between UPSU news and Pugwash News News, but i'm sure this is something that is in progress ;)

Fri, 21 Mar 2008

 

 

Hi Tom, 
 
I agree that reflecting the editorial direction of the printed Pugwash News (and Pugwash mag) online is important, but I believe the cardinal failing when you divorce student media from the Union is that you lose a massive proportion of your incidental readership who stumble across the content without actively seeking it out. 
 
I reckon that, as long as we handle that separation correctly, we have a lot less to worry about. 
 
Of course, I could well be missing something much more important and obvious...!!

Alex Harries - Fri, 21 Mar 2008

 

 

Hi Alex, 
 
I just stumbled across this post while scanning the stats for the Palatinate website.  
 
Thanks for the support and kind words. Always nice to hear. 
 
I've also had a read of some of your recent posts. Good work and a really interesting read. It would be nice if our Sabb officers could get into the whole blogging movement. It seems to be a good way to help interact with the student body. 
 
Your union website seems generally excellent. A particularly strong case for a sabbatical media officer. 
 
Keep up the good work!

Mike Smith (Medicine (Durham)) - Tue, 25 Mar 2008