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DartNewsOnline

The student news site of St. Teresa's Academy

DartNewsOnline

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The fabulous life of a first year DartNewsOnline webbie

An opinion | by BETSY TAMPKE

As I pass Matt Stewart in the hallway I give him a highly significant look, not in an effort to woo him with my eyes, rather to say “I”m one of you.”  Following right behind him is Sydney Deatherage, who holds up three fingers and addresses me as “W”.  When I get home from school my phone buzzes with texts that aren”t meant for me, but for the entire school.  Next I log into a fictional character”s Facebook account and grieve over what her status should be.

Why do I get to do all of this?

Because it”s my first year on staff, and I”m a webbie.

Which, naturally, entitles me to consider myself an equal with Technology Coordinator Matt Stewart, have a hand signal created by Sydney Deatherage to identify fellow staffers, forward texts to Twitter, and secretly be Teresa Dart on Facebook… well I guess it”s not a secret anymore.

This year five Dart staffers built www.dartnewsonline.com using the WordPress program.  Its intention, to keep The Dart”s news coverage up to date with the ever progressing and changing world of news coverage. 

I am the only member of web staff who has never been on Dart staff before, yet remarkably I still earned the title, “Web Publicity Manager.”

Impressive right? 

 

Almost as impressive as the new slew of technical sounding words I have picked up in my journey through the world of the web.  In order to sounds as smart as possible, I try to use these new words whenever I can.  For example, if you are passing me in the hall one day as I am talking to Morgan Said, fellow webbie, you might hear me say, “Last night, while trying to organize our Adsense account, I noticed that our Google Analytics ratings, installed by tracker codes, were up. I also noticed that our google ratings, are climbing due to our increased amount of meta data.  Log on to your word press account to see for yourself on our widgets, dashboard, and gazettes.”

 

Sounds fancy right?

 

Before you are completely overcome by my awe-inspiring use of vocabulary, keep in mind  that I probably used about a third of those words incorrectly, I haven”t even figured out how to set up our Adsense account, and I am unsure if any of the programs I set up are working like they should be.  Mainly because I have had to teach myself everything out of a book, test it by trial and error, and for the most part have a very narrow idea of what I”m supposed to be doing.

And I”m not only talking about web terms. 

At the beginning of this year I had never been a part of The Dart staff before and suddenly I was the sole person in charge of promoting it.  I had never used Twitter and I was now in charge of every single tweet that goes up there.  Facebook became an entirely different kind of friend.

I taking my first plunge into the mysterious, terrifying waters of newspaper, like many of my fellow first years.  But they were jumping off of the high dive, while I was  cliff diving…. as an amateur swimmer… in shark infested water… in the middle of a category five hurricane. 

Like five blind mice trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle the web staff is trying to piece together a site that embodies STA with no guide to tell us what to do, how to do it, and most importantly how not to screw it up.

With most of us working on the website and the print, were walking a fine line between The Dart”s traditions and The Dart”s future.  As journalists are trying to cling to their print papers, terrified of multimedia coverage; STA is boldly marching into the future with a battle cry of “WWW.DARTNEWSONLINE.COM“.  

So Matt Stewart, next time I see you in the hall, please don”t be creeped out.

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