St. Joseph’s College’s newly launched blog site OnCampus has just earned a prestigious award for its news content.
The microsite won the Fair Media Council’s 2017 Folio Award for Best Overall Blog Site Devoted to a Particular Topic or Interest. The liberal arts college, which has campuses in Patchogue and Brooklyn, launched the site in August.
“We wanted to have our own modern hub for news, ” said St. Joseph’s multimedia copywriter David Henne.
OnCampus is SJC’s weekly news source that spotlights students, alumni, and faculty using multimedia content.
Since 2015, St. Joseph’s has worked to modernize its online presence through the school’s marketing and communications department to better use new and emerging media, Henne said.
The school has also added a social media manager.
Henne, who worked in public relations before joining SJC in 2011, spearheaded the launch of the microsite. “I pitched the idea to our vice president, Jessica McAleer, she gave me the green light, and we’ve built it up with a great team,” he said.
He attributes the site’s early success to the institution’s small community, which makes it a bit easier to spotlight student success and engage an audience,
“We did a great [feature] on a student interning with NASA…where in a big school you might just get news stories,” he said.
Moving forward, the OnCampus team will be looking to post shorter posts and videos designed to be more engaging on social media.
The college’s editorial director, Brian Harmon, who edits the site, credit its hard-working and imaginative staff for helping the microsite gain attention from the Fair Media Council, a not-for-profit media watchdog group that advocates for quality local news content.
“We’re really just getting started with this endeavor,” Harmon said. “We’re already engaging two campus communities —SJC Brooklyn and SJC Long Island — with quality content in a variety of forms. But we’ll be looking to increase the amount of videos we produce, while adding long-form written pieces that delve into important topics and feature the expertise of our faculty and administrators.”
