OVERVIEW
THE CURRENT STATE
RESEARCH AND HISTORY
A BRAND TRANSFORMATION
PRINT PRODUCTS
LESSONS LEARNED
OVERVIEW
A digital-first brand transformation for a student news publication.
Rebranding a digital publication for an increasingly online audience.
Redesigning the mobile and web experience, managing the end-to-end journey of three 20-page physical print issues, editing and publishing 100+ articles digitally and in print for an audience of over 39,000 Western University students. I managed the culture, graphics, and video teams!
ROLE
Managing Editor (Culture, Video & Graphics)
YEAR
2018-2020
TOOLS
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Blox CMS
DELIVERABLES
Published Articles/Assets, Mobile Experience, Website Redesign
THE CURRENT STATE
The life or death of print media on campus.
In 2019, the Ontario Government attempted to slash student funding. Known as the Student Choice Initiative (SCI), the government lobbied for student ancillary fees to be optional, meaning student papers across Ontario were anticipating a major funding cut.
So the question became: how do we rally voices and get Western students to care about campus crises, student issues, and ultimately, the importance of our community?
RESEARCH AND HISTORY
I did some digging on the Gazette's history, and its presence and reputation on campus.
I collected over 150 anecdotes, quotes, data points and experiences from dozens of alumni and current students, dug through The Gazette's history and learned about it's deep-rooted reputation against the university's executives and student council.
(1) Historically, The Gazette was brutally honest and unapologetic about everything, and not in the way Western administrators liked, so around the early 2000s, the paper stopped publishing the raw and outrageous content that students loved and related to.
76% of students surveyed in 2019 said they were uninterested in event coverage, which took up almost 40% of the Gazette's content output.
Michael Laine (Gazette alumni)
The Western Gazette print archives from the 70s-80s
(2) Modern students prefer to consume digital news content on social media instead of news sites and printed newspapers. The Gazette created their first website in 2015, but engagement was still fairly low, in the dozens.
92% of students surveyed (2019) said they get their news on social media.
26% of students surveyed in 2019 have never picked up a Gazette issue before.
84% of students surveyed said they actually prefer social media news (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook) instead of news websites.
According to our analytics, articles with multimedia content such as video, graphics, animations, audio, etc., had higher engagement across all platforms than stories with no multimedia content.
Best performing content with 16k views, with the last viral video at 25k, 8 years ago in 2011.
(3) Most people are unengaged with student issues because they don't know where to find information.
67% of students in first year surveyed said they have never heard of the Gazette.
62% of students surveyed said they have never browsed through the Gazette's website.
So we pivoted our coverage strategy starting with our brand identity…
SAO ISSUE BANNER DESIGNED BY ME
A BRAND TRANSFORMATION
R.I.P. print and boring event coverage, welcome multimedia digital journalism and raw coverage.
We channeled our budget and energy into multimedia content. We dug deep into student struggles, brought diverse voices to light, and captured the essence of student life.
Our online presence and brand identity was created with a clean, responsive layout and a heavy focus on quality over quantity content.
The Gazette's first website in 2015
The Gazette's website in 2019
PRINT PRODUCTS
Okay, print is not completely dead…
For our existing readers and legacy audience, we understood the importance of print products. Based on importance and historical popularity, we decided to print four special issues: the SAO issue, the Housing issue, the Sex issue, and the Spoof issue (unfortunately cut due to the start of the pandemic).
THE SAO ISSUE
SAO (Student Academic Orientation) is our first impression on students. In previous years, the Gazette wrote glamourous stories about university and campus life that certainly appealed to sparkly-eyed new students who were just beginning their academic journeys, but we wanted students to see us as an unfiltered source of truth that tour guides don't reveal.
THE HOUSING ISSUE
Roughly 90% of Western students are from out of town. While most first-years live in on-campus residence, most students need to find housing in the city. This issue highlights important stories from tenant rights, residence catastrophes, and tips and tricks for renting.
THE SEX ISSUE
Historically, the sex issue had always been controversial, but important. It not only gained the most engagement, it also sparked important conversations around sex education, both physical and mental, healthy relationships, beauty standards, and more.
LESSONS LEARNED
Three takeaways from leading a digital-first transformation.
(1) Be adaptable and courageous in the face of changing environments.
The Gazette faced the looming shadow of funding cuts and a dwindling print audience. Instead of being comfortable, we boldly pivoted to a digital-first approach and visual rebrand, focusing on hard news and multimedia content. This not only emphasized our presence on campus but it also resonated with current students' thinking, behaviours, and mindsets. Our adaptability and human-centred thinking gave us a unique edge to remain Canada's largest student paper.
(2) Care about what your audience cares about.
Through surveys, we realized students were disengaged because they cared about finding trustworthy and credible sources. By revamping our website with a clean, responsive layout and putting our efforts into multimedia journalism, we came to students with engaging, trustworthy and visually pleasing content, while reporting on stories that were important within the community. By the end of the year, we increased our content engagement by 30%!
(3) Listen to your data, they are usually 99.999999% right.
I measured the performance of previously published articles for the last 3 years (2016-2019) and found that culture and opinion pieces or articles with multimedia generally garnered more attention than news or sports stories or articles with no multimedia content. This insight guided us to rethink our content strategy. By creating more interesting multimedia content around our stories (reporting videos, graphics, infographics, maps, recordings, graphs, etc.), we increased our social media engagement, with our top performing video on YouTube gaining 16k views!
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