It took a few digital platforms before UT El Paso-based Borderzine.com found success in its mission to inform and employ, said Webmaster Lourdes Cueva Chacón.
“We started with 50 unique visitors a month,” Cueva Chacón said of the website that first launched in December 2008. “We are now around 20,000 a month.”
Senior journalism lecturer and Borderzine.com director Zita Arocha told the Columbia Journalism Review in a May interview that the program was founded with two goals: “One is to tell the unreported stories of the [U.S.-Mexico] border region, which mainstream media doesn’t do very well,” Arocha said. The second was to give young Latino journalists “a leg up so that they can move into media positions throughout the country, and help create some diversity within news media.”
Now the project, which is a unique hybrid of university class and online publication, has received national recognition by journalism organizations and has helped El Paso students get internships and full-time jobs in newsrooms across the country.
Photo courtesy Lourdes Cueva Chacon
But finding the right platform for Borderzine took some experimenting. They started with iWeb, a website creation tool from Apple. That worked well enough for individual posts, but wasn’t good for a multiple user enterprise that could showcase students, said Cueva Chacón, who received her master’s degree in information science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was brought on to the Borderzine project for her expertise in usability, information architecture and interface design.
“We ended up deciding a magazine style site was a way to go, but it also had to have a component students could use as a portfolio,” she said.
So Borderzine.com was built out on a Joomla platform. At the time it was more stable than WordPress and had more functionality.
“WordPress hadn’t developed into a magazine or newspaper style yet. It was still a blogger tool,” Cueva Chacón said.
That all changed when WordPress quickly evolved into more of a publishing platform with a simple content management system and loads of third-party plugins that let users add a variety of features. By comparison, Cueva Chacón said, the version of Joomla that Borderzine was built on now felt cumbersome and limited. So they migrated to a WordPress platform customized by El Paso web designer Brandon Carillo to include author’s pages to showcasing student contributors.
WordPress reflects a newsroom experience by having different user levels that can control what content users have access to, Cueva Chacón explained.
“There are the authors, they can input the story but they cannot publish it. There has to be an editor and that’s the person who is able to publish the story and revise it and reject it if needed.”
WordPress basic only includes four user types – subscriber, author, editor and administrator – so Borderzine added a plugin for more user types and more specific levels of access. For example, a user designated as an intern can update content on some pages, but doesn’t have the authority of an editor to publish pages.
Flexibility in user management became even more important as the Borderzine project has grown to include partners from other Hispanic-serving colleges and universities who sought an outlet for student work. Students can post articles, video and audio slideshows in English or Spanish.
Most of the web traffic for Borderzine.com comes from the U.S., Cueva Chacón said, but the site has readers in more than 90 countries. Portada Magazine included Borderzine.com among its nominations for Top Hispanic Digital Media Innovation for 2010.
And now Mexodus a major bilingual journalism project developed by the Borderzine team reporting on the fallout of violence in Mexico has been named a finalist in the 2012 Online Journalism Awards. Content from the two-semester project stories was reproduced by several media partners including the El Paso Times, Fox News Latino, Hispanic Link and Al Dia Philadelphia.
“Because it was focused on just one topic the design of the site was completely different than Borderzine,” Cueva Chacón said, explaining that the Mexodus site was also heavily customized by Brandon Carillo using the WordPress platform.
Cueva Chacón is pleased at the success of Borderzine.com as a training tool, a showcase tool and a recruiting tool. Alumni of the program have picked up highly competitive internships from Scripps Howard, The Associated Press, Chips Quinn Scholars, Al Dia Philadelphia and the Boston Globe. Graduates have landed jobs as multimedia reporters in newsrooms from coast to coast.
“It has worked especially for internships. Once a student has taken the Borderzine class that student has at least five clips that they can show,” she said. “They can use that to apply to any internship. With the internships they grow their portfolio and then they get hired.”
As the Borderzine program has grown, so has its digital audience and the content. Cueva Chacón is now a full-time lecturer in multimedia for the UTEP Department of Communications. She works closely with director Arocha and senior lecturer David Smith-Soto to create a newsroom experience for students as they cover border issues.
“We have a very broad definition of what a border is,” she said. “It’s more about barriers. So language barriers, gender barriers – any kind of obstacle that people have to overcome. So that gives us a lot of topics to talk about.”
Controversial stories on topics like immigration attract a lot of comments from readers. But one of the most popular articles was a simple reflection of border culture, Cueva Chacón said.
“It was pictures from El Paso of the Virgin of Guadalupe,” she said. “It was part of a photography class. So we put together a gallery of images.”
“You never know what’s going to get people’s attention.”
This profile is part of Digitalegre’s series on the digital community in the El Paso, Juarez and Southern New Mexico area. If you know of a person or company that you would like to learn more about, please email kategannon@digitalegre.com
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