For this assignment I chose to track Boston University’s own online news site: BU Today. According to BU Today’s about page, “the news and information website of Boston University is published by the office of Marketing & Communications every day school is in session.” The site mainly covers news that are local to the BU community, ranging from campus life articles to new discoveries made by students and faculty.
As seen in the screen shot above, the layout of the online news site is fairly easy to navigate. The top tab on the front page categorizes all the articles by interest, allowing viewers to sort out the articles in their fields of interest quickly and conveniently. On a typical day, the right top column would feature a “close up”, articles that highlight what happened on campus recently, providing the viewers a slice of the BU life. The left top column on the front page would be the “Top Headlines” section, which lists the articles published on that day. Scrolling down, the site also provides a section that features the BU event calendar, allowing viewers to know what events are happening/coming up soon. The site also include a “Featured Video” section, an opinions section “In Your Words”, a concise topic list with the trending topics, a section for the “Series”, and an “Editor’s Pick” section.
The two hidden gems of the website, in my opinion, is the archive and the full topic list at the upper right corner on the front page. The archive section contains all the articles that have been published on the site since it’s launching in 2005, and they came be filtered through “categories” and/or media type, and sorted either alphabetically or timely. The full topic list lists all of the tags that have been used in previous articles in a alphabetical order, allowing easy research and continuous reading on a certain topic and see how it has progressed through time.
Apart from its online site, BU Today also sends out newsletter to every active bu.edu email account on a daily basis to keep the campus residents updated on news on campus.
Visualization of Journalism 