Oh yeah: The history of Strike Situation

Here is the recounting of the (extremely short) history of Strike Situation.  As beneficial as it is for us to document our beginnings, I hope it may add to the discussion on news start-ups and the future of online news.

Recently, I focused on the technological aspects and challenges of starting Strike Situation. This post will offer more context of how we launched and maintained the site.

In the beginning

On Nov. 4, Scott and I made preparations for launch. It was a Thursday and we had just decided that the next Monday would be lift-off.

We had bought the domain name and paid for hosting the previous day. We did a bit of initial tinkering with the WordPress theme to suit our initial purposes — an “open/closed” in the sidebar, the logo, less hideous fonts, etc.

Scott and I decided to meet with everyone to hash out duties amongst the team. Luckily, as journalism students, we all share a common hub — the third floor of the St. Patrick’s Building on Carleton’s campus.

First we spoke with Julia and confirmed she was onboard to head breaking news and profiles content. Then Scott, Jeanne, Katherine and I gathered in the cramped telephone room to hash out how to manage coverage, divvy out responsibilities and plan out some of the first content to go live.

A news site is born

Later that day, I went to shoot a video for Capital News Online. On my way back to school, we got word that CUASA had set its strike deadline. But what is breaking news without a website to host it?

Scott and I agreed to meet back in St. Pats. Scott recently told me he sprinted most of the way to campus from his house. Meanwhile, I endured the less athletic, but painfully long bus ride back to school.

In the Cap News lab, we both hovered over laptops. Between editing my video so I wouldn’t fail the next day and spell checking over Scott’s shoulder, we wrote up the breaking news story. Luckily most of the site had been built, and all we needed to do was some tweaking.

Julia had also already done some initial street team promotion, cryptically writing the URL on lecture and classroom chalkboards and letting her classmates know to check out the site.

Around 9 p.m., Scott hit the publish button on the backend as I removed the password protection from the site. We went live with Scott’s story on CUASA’s strike deadline. Background on the grounds for striking and a message from us also went up.

We had already set-up a Twitter feed and a Facebook page and began sending out the links. In an attempt to communicate our newborn site to the Carleton community, the five of us tweeted, retweeted, posted and reposted. Scott and I also texted everyone we thought would be interested or be able to pass the message along about our new site.

Generating content

From there we spent a lot of time brainstorming story ideas and how best to cover them. There was more content than I think we anticipated in the run-up to strike deadlines. We were especially lucky that our intrepid writer, Katherine, was visiting a friend at York University on the same weekend as their two-year strike anniversary.

While some contended the comparison between the two schools were overstated, we maintained that the similarities between York’s CUPE 3903 and Carleton’s CUPE 4600, who both represent TAs and contract faculty, was a great avenue to explore the effect of strikes on a university campus.

Katherine gathered some great material from York and filed it back by e-mail. I put together a slideshow that night and we had it up in the morning as our first multimedia package. A feature story by Katherine, digging into the lasting effects of the strike, followed.

From there we were doing two jobs, covering the lead-up to a potential strike and preparing coverage for a post-strike world.

If you build it …

Having launched earlier than expected and in a rush, I wasn’t ready for the overwhelming response we received.

Between launch and midnight on Thursday we had 592 unique visitors to the site. By Friday night that number had nearly tripled. We received hundreds of comments as well.

To say the least, we were sort of stunned.

To date the site has garnered 8,000 unique visitors and more than 60,000 pages views.

Our Facebook page, at its height, had over 950 followers and almost 80,000 post views. On Twitter we had some 200 followers.

Scott will have more on the nitty-gritty of the analytics and some insights on driving traffic in a later post.

The website started as a way to demystify the strike for students. Our friends, who are TAs, Carleton employees and just regular students, were confused. So were we.

The coverage spread from breaking news, to union profiles, to need-to-know updates. We added “The Daily Situation,” a nightly wrap-up on the day’s events written by Scott.

We also tried to put together a “Viewpoints” section, where we asked for open calls from the community, but we received no responses. Instead, people stuck to the comments section to make their views known.

Finally, without time to iron out any sort of formal editorial policy, we decided to stay away from opinions and stick to what we know — news and analysis. In retrospect, given the divisive nature of the subject, it was probably a good call.

Strike Situation was a microcosm for what we hope to do next. It was a way to test the waters for a lot of ideas we see as the future of local online journalism.

You can still expect something much bigger from us in the very near future. We’re working hard to bring you more news you love and need. For now, be sure to stay tuned to this site for updates.

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