Thesis:
The Stevenson Villager is a school newspaper that is electronically published every week. The school paper is run by Stevenson students, specifically journalism students, as well as the university community. The Villager focuses on reporting about university news, features on students, faculty, local events, and offers several different viewpoints to channel the most information as possible to the public. Not only does The Villager inform the public but it also gives an insight to students about the journaling world, and if this is a career that they might want to pursue post-graduation.
Although the Villager allows the public to see the positive outlets at Stevenson University. It lacks to shine light on the not so positive things that have happened at this school and can potentially happen. Lastly, it does not have the best visual appeal that other online newspapers contain.
Visual:
When you first look at the Villager page, you can see that it is true to the Stevenson colors. There is a while background, with a large green header and black text. The front page has an ample number of images and rolling content which automatically pleases the eye. However, once you search through the Villager itself it becomes very bland. With a white background and all black text, the pages become boring. An ideal, and minor switch would could possibly be a different color background, either green, black, or even gray, to stay true to school colors. With contrasting colors, depending on the background color, to help make it stand out, and easy to read.
Linguistic:
As previously mentioned, the Villager is run my students. This means that all the articles are written by the students, and editors of the paper are students as well. These students are well versed in the AP Style of writing, which the Villager is written in. The students writing for the paper have been experienced in writing within their Journalism classes, and any other English classes that have been taken.
The villager mainly focuses on the student life here at Stevenson. A majority of the articles are articles written about the sports teams here, as well as features on upcoming events on campus and locally.
Aural:
Unlike older websites in the past, the Villager does not have audio playing as soon as you open their page. The website as a whole lack’s videos on the website, but there are links that can take the public to videos to watch. For example, one article about car thief’s on campus, has a news report video with Matt Patti (the reporter) and Stevenson student Shannon Snyder (victim of car theft) explaining the situation. Rather than having to read about the issue, the public gets to watch and listen, allowing a different culture.
Spatial:
Spatially the Villager is very appealing. There is a search bar in the top right corner which allows for easy navigation. This can be based off of the writer of the article, or the topic of the article. On the home page I would say that there is an acceptable amount of white space. However, when it comes to the article pages there is a larger amount of white space, that can become distracting to the readers eye.
Gestural:
The Villager is not very interactive, as an online paper, there should be more embedded videos to keep the readers engaged. It is hard to have a gestural component of an online newspaper when there is no way for people to connect/communicate. There are hyperlinks that allow viewers to travel to different content but this does not benefit the paper itself when it comes to readers reactions.