Whitman Pioneer


The April 30, 2009 front page of the Whitman Pioneer
Frequency Weekly newspaper
University [[uaffiliation::Whitman College]]
Financial income Funds provided by the Associated Students of Whitman College
Editor in chief Kim Sommers, Jamie Soukup
News editor Molly Smith
Design editor Sara Rasmussen
Campus editor Hanna Ory
Opinion editor Derek Thurber
Arts editor Mike Sado
Online editor Andrew Spittle
Sports editor Andy Jobanek
Photo editor Peter Zipparo
Staff 82 students
Headquarters 280 Boyer Avenue
Reid Campus Center, Room 239
Walla Walla, WA 99362
Web site http://whitmanpioneer.com
Twitter @WhitmanPio
CMS Wordpress

The Whitman Pioneer is a weekly student-run newspaper at Whitman College that has been publishing on Wordpress since September 2006. Before that date, a PDF version of the paper had been uploaded to the web. Andrew Witherspoon launched the website originally with a Wordpress.com blog, and he and Daniel Bachhuber migrated the website to a self-hosted install during the spring of 2007. In December of 2008 the Whitman Pioneer created a Web Manager position that oversees the management of the site's content. Less than a month later the site relaunched with a new custom design.

Contents

About the Whitman Pioneer:

The Whitman College Pioneer is the weekly student newspaper; written, designed, edited, photographed, drawn, and distributed by a staff of 82 Whitman students through funds provided by ASWC (the Associated Students of Whitman College). The Pioneer is a mouthpiece for the student body, intended to further conversation and discussion about and concerning Whitman College and the world beyond. The Pioneer promotes above all the freedom of the press on campus, and strives to be a cohesive force to Whitman as a whole.

The relaunch of the site in 2009:

In February of 2009 the Whitman Pioneer launched a newly designed website along with its first print issue of the semester. The site was designed by Phil Thompson and was based upon the Revolution News theme. With this new theme the Pioneer was able to accommodate its expanding photography and illustration departments as well as include graphics of its print edition. The site is still a little bit of a work in progress, and new content and features will be added to it shortly.

"Best in Show" at the 2009 ACP Conference:

In March of 2009 three members of the Pioneer staff attended the ACP Conference in San Diego, CA. The Whitman Pioneer took home the "Best in Show" award for its website. The following weeks saw a significant bump in traffic as well; the site went from around 700 visitors on days that it published content to over 1200. More information about the award can be found at the Pioneer's press release.

Q&A With Andrew Spittle

  • Web Editor’s Name: Andrew Spittle
  • How Often Do You Publish (Online): The vast majority is published once a week on Thursday.
  • How Often Do You Publish (Print): Once a week (Thursday).
  • What is the most interesting feature on your Web site? The Publish2 integration.
  • Size of Staff: About 80 students
  • Size of Audience Your Site Reaches: The campus community as well as about 19,000 monthly online visitors.
  • What is your community’s interact with your site consist of? There are a decent number of comments left and we are working on getting forums going for more prolonged discussion of certain topics.
  • What’s the best way to reach your community? Facebook by far (see the post that I wrote for the CoPress blog about testing Twitter on our campus).
  • Contact info of Web Editor: spittlaj@whitman.edu or on Twitter @andrewspittle
  • Average Number of Weekly Hits: ~5,000 resulting in ~9,000 pageviews
  • Hosting Company: Fused Network
  • Server Size: 3GB
  • What are you hoping to do with your site to improve it/take it to the next level during the next school year? I’m hoping to redesign the category landing pages this summer as well as the homepage. The goal will be to try and put a greater emphasis on the individual story pages so that more of our visitors make it to those (currently about 60% of visits are to the homepage).

Colophon

Hosting

The Pioneer website is running:

  • a self-hosted (currently with Fused Network) version of Wordpress 2.7

Plugins

The Pioneer uses the following:

Stats:

  • During a publication week the Pioneer's website receives between 300 and 700 visitors a day. This results in roughly 500 to 900 individual pageviews.

Read about the Pioneer

Current contact information

The current Web Manager for the Pioneer is Andrew Spittle who can be found on Twitter and his own website. You can also contact the Pioneer at their contact page or follow them on Twitter

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