The Viking news is a student run website contained with events and stories that relate to student life, yet you don’t ever see the school website feature the Viking News, or link to the Viking News website on the home page. The Long Beach City College homepage needs to promote the student-run paper since the Viking’s sole purpose is to report and write stories for students on topics and events students would be interested in.
There are currently over 24,000 students attending LBCC, on the LAC Campus there are several computer labs with free access that give students hundreds of computers, most of these computers either default load to the main LBCC website, or have easy access to the LBCC website.
Even potential students that are thinking about attending LBCC either out of high school or just looking to come back to school, have to go through the LBCC website at some point.
It’s almost undeniable that most students have to go through the school website at some point or another, which means that the site gets a ton of traffic, intentional or not.
Then when looking at what sort of content is on their front page, you see that it’s mainly towards either student related events and activities or student created content, but you see nothing about the Viking News.
If the LBCC website promoted its own school newspaper along with their own public relations reports of events and stories, not only would this provide a big boost to the amount of exposure the Viking in terms of web traffic, but it would also potentially expose a lot more students to the journalism department and what sort of work journalism students do on a day-to-day basis.
Some might say, “Well the school has no obligation to feature the Viking News on the website.”
It’s a valid point, the school is not obligated to post anything that they post. It’s curated content that is chosen by the web designers or whoever decides what content is going to go up.
Even getting to the Viking website is fairly un-intuitive as you have really two ways of getting there through the LBCC website itself.
First, being through the search function, which if you don’t know the correct keywords to use it could be hard to find. Even upon finding the page for it it looks awfully bland and has little to no information on how the paper is made, what classes they are or how it helps an aspiring journalism major.
Second, is going through the “Explore Our Programs” tab and with that you have to go through the following clicks:
Explore Our Programs > Communications > Journalism > ?
So really there is only one way, because once you navigate to this page there is no way to get to the Viking website from here.
How about the more technical side of things? How realistic would it be to incorporate some sort of feature on the website and whose shoulders would it fall on?
It’s difficult to know for sure the skill and experience of whoever the school gets to do their web design, but upon examination of the website’s source code it appears to be written in the “HTML” web language, which is basically the type of code web designers use in order to design websites.
Though, LBCC.edu is relatively easy to navigate, finding the information you need can be a bit nuanced sometimes but it works for the most part and it has an appealing design.
In contrast with the Viking’s web design which is much more robust, simple and has a very “information first” approach which is to be expected from a journalism website.
Jordan Ambra, an online programmer, explained that web languages are harder to code than more typical languages, he says the brain is accustomed to visual-cues opposed to visual software language like HTML/CSS.
Despite the workload, LBCC should consider promoting the Viking News more extensively. I don’t think it would be a good look to cancel the Journalism program due to lack of exposure.
The Journalism program at LBCC is seemingly always having to cut corners every semester in-order to keep enrollment up and the school should be making an effort to keep the program afloat.
LBCC might be underestimating the benefits of having a booming journalism program on campus. Things like the paper being a legitimate news source for student and faculty alike being able to promote on-campus events, informing students about important resources, reminding of upcoming deadlines, and more.
The Viking News offers a unique benefit of being extremely student relatable as it is 100% student run and student focused. Something the regular LBCC website could use to it’s advantage by working with the Viking in order to shed light on important topics and get students the information they need.
There are several different approaches to it, at least in terms of web design.
First, and probably the most technically intensive task, is to create a sort of custom widget for the front page about the Viking. It could have “The Viking’s Top Stories” or constantly cycle out different stories from the week or just highlight what’s big in the newspaper right now.
Another could be to feature Viking news articles on the homepage periodically when something important gets published. A bit simpler, but the periodical promotion could go a long way.
Finally and possibly the least impactful, but including some sort of link on the homepage saying something along the lines of, “Want to keep up with student events on and off campus? Visit the Viking News [Insert Link]” just something that isn’t buried beneath several layers of links, searches, and an uninteresting webpage.
The Journalism department shouldn’t have as low as enrollment numbers as it has currently when it has been such an important part of the school’s history and could be a bigger part of it’s legacy.