Err…AmhPub, rather?
Actually, those of you who have taken a class with Professor Pavel Machala will recognize the title: neocon-turned-Obamacon Francis Fukuyama famously declared that the end of the Cold War represented the end of history, at least in the sense of ideological competition. Well, there’s been a bunch of history since then, and guess what: we’re going to have some more. Similarly, I’d caution against declaring the end of AmhPub.
It’s no secret that AmhPub - after an incredibly strong, hyped, and well-publicized start last year - has dropped precipitously during the summer/semester in terms of popularity, posts, views, editing, site development, etc. etc.. AmhPub is pretty much as close to dead as you can get. Major ghost town.
What happened? Certainly a combination of circumstances - basically, however, things just kind of fell apart. It’s possible that Amherst simply isn’t ready for something like AmhPub yet. You have to answer two questions:
- Are the readers ready to change decades-old habits? Amherst students have been reading the campus publications in Val for years. Can we get folks to check AmhPub like they check the New York Times online, Gawker, or ESPN.com?
- Are the writers ready to branch out from the security blankets of layout and copy editors? Could Amherst students really decide that AmhPub was a worthwhile endeavor? Is there even room for AmhPub with The Student, The Indicator, and a bunch of other revolving publications?
I’m not sure what the answers are to these questions. I think that - eventually - something like AmhPub is an inevitability. But maybe we aren’t ready yet; maybe AmhPub will fizzle and join the likes of PlanWorld (some creepy ‘05 is reading this and pounding his fist on the table) and The New Athenian.
Or maybe not. It turns out that Sam Grausz ‘09, Erik Andrews ‘09, and Jimmy Laff ‘09 [the creators of this website] are trying to turn the reigns over to our friend Woody Brown ‘11. This is a good move - Woody was the youngest and second-best-looking-male-staff-writer at AmhPub. The most telling sign of AmhPub’s demise is that not a single first-year has posted. Woody’s the only dude with a shot at fixing that. But he’s got his work cut out for him.
On a personal note, I’ll be leaving campus next semester para estudiar en el extranjero. Yea, that’s right - I’m going to Buenos Aires. Get jealous. I will, of course, cease writing a blog on Campus Affairs. Hopefully, I’ll stay involved with the site through personal blogging or in some other capacity. Meanwhile, I’d like to thank you all for reading. I’ve had a lot of fun over the past couple semesters.
I’d like to offer Woody and the AmhPub world some suggestions before I go. I’m not sure how feasible any of these ideas are, but I think some of them could be of use. Needless to say, Woody will have to recruit some developers like Jimmy and Erik with serious techology knowhow. Any comp sci majors or other code-literate students should absolutely get in touch.
- Move from a “e-zine” format (e.g. Slate) to a more traditional group blog format (e.g. DailyKos). A new post would simply go above the previous. Consider the “There’s More” function of fivethirtyeight.com to ensure assessibility and ease of use.
- Recruit way more staff writers - say, 30 or 40. Make sure half of them are first-years. Scrap the idea of focused blogs on individual topics. Instead, require each staff writer to write just one post per week of any length on any topic they choose. It could be a single sentence: “Teh food at Val sux lolz!” or it could be a 3,000 word essay explaining the political situation in Somalia. Such an approach would assure new material every day on relevant and interesting topics.
- Find a way to advertise. Once people start writing, we need to let students know the site exists.
- Encourage comments. You’re reading this right now, but you won’t comment because no one else has. This leads other people to think that no one is reading it, discouraging them from commenting. And so the vicious cycle continues. Also, commenting - along with instantaneous publishing - is really what sets blogging apart from traditional media.
Good luck, Woody. I hope you can pull it off. I’m sure I’ll be back here soon enough, but until then:
¡Hasta luego, amigos!
10 responses so far ↓
1 Sandy Klanfer (sklanfer09) // Dec 26, 2008 at 6:43 pm
I’ll be the ‘09 who shakes his fist at you. Planworld is far from dead. Nearly 75 people have updated in the past 24 hours–that doesn’t sound like a dead community to me. Planworld is small, but it’s thriving. Planworld’s level of activity is certainly light-years beyond AmhPub’s. (In the future, perhaps you should visit Planworld’s stats page before you try to argue that no one uses it.) But hey, on the bright side, AmhPub is still beating the New Athenian!
To be fair, though, I think you make some really good points about what AmhPub needs to do to resurrect itself, and I hope that AmhPub can come back and become popular.
2 Dave Ullman (dullman10) // Dec 26, 2008 at 8:14 pm
That is true, but ultimately irrelevant. I never argued that “no one uses it”; the problem is that the people who do use it are overwhelmingly not Amherst students. Tell me how many CURRENT students use it, break that number down by class year, and then tell me Planworld has a future at Amherst.
I’m not knocking Planworld - it was a great idea with terrific programming. The creators should be given a ton of credit - Planworld was way before its time. But it peaked years ago.
3 Sandy Klanfer (sklanfer09) // Dec 26, 2008 at 8:45 pm
In the past week, roughly 20 ’09s have updated their plans. In the past week, exactly two people have made AmhPub posts. That’s not including the ’10s, ’11s, and ’12s on Planworld–there aren’t many, but there’s more on Planworld than on AmhPub. In fact, I would be willing to bet $10 that the majority of the people who have visited this post came to you directly from the link I posted on my plan, and I know for a fact that I’ve received more feedback on this issue via Planworld than you have via Amhpub, unless there’s a lot of comments you’re just not making public.The biggest problem facing Planworld is the same problem facing AmhPub–people see no reason to use it. Planworld’s growth slowed dramatically when Facebook came around, and slowed further when Facebook opened to highschoolers. People see no reason to use communication tools like AmhPub or Planworld, when they can communicate with all their Amherst friends and all their home friends via Facebook. The two problems facing both sites are the same: 1. Publicity (Attracting users). 2. Establish, somehow, how your site is superior to Facebook (Keeping users). I believe that Planworld has done the second–it has a sense of community that people who come to Planworld generally like and don’t leave. Planworld has failed miserably at the first in recent years. AmhPub was, at first, good at the publicity thing, but, as the large number of AmhPub accounts that have only one post show, really bad at the second. AmhPub needs to find its identity, and, ultimately, I think you’re right, AmhPub would be most successful if it became more of a traditional group blog, like the DailyKos (but with a wider range of opinions). It would then be something that all students would feel a sense of ownership over, and differentiate itself from Facebook.
4 rruskin10 (rruskin10) // Dec 26, 2008 at 10:18 pm
Planworld is not dead *pounds fist on table*; if you’re looking for a blogging community, you should try it.
5 Dave Ullman (dullman10) // Dec 26, 2008 at 10:27 pm
You should feel free to send me that $10 then (AC #825) - 14 people thus far have hit my page with your link. More than twice that have visited my post. But let’s be clear here - I never said that “Planworld is dead” or that “no one uses it”; rather, my point is that it will cease to be relevant to the Amherst campus in short time. So will AmhPub, unless we make some real changes.
As for the thrusts of the two sites, I think they fill different purposes. I think you’re correct when you attribute Planworld’s disuse to Facebook. Both are highly personal endeavors; you share what’s going on in your life. On the other hand, I view the Student and the Indicator as AmhPub’s natural competitors. The vision of this site was for students to write opinion; analysis; commentary on campus and on the world. That’s the idea, anyway. Aside from that I basically agree with your points.
6 Sandy Klanfer (sklanfer09) // Dec 26, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Fair enough–That $10 will be in your mailbox when you get back to campus, along with a chunk of my ego. I disagree with you that AmhPub is going to compete with the Student. The student conveys information–the people who write for them do reporting. Are you proposing that AmhPub become an online newspaper? I also think the comparison to the Indicator is false as well: most people don’t see AmhPub, or any student blogging, as a venue for serious commentary or debate of the type that the Indicator contains–for the most part, the people who do use AmhPub use it for topics or opinions that they would never consider writing about in the Indicator. Print still seems to have some sort of cachet as the place for Serious Opinion on Intellectual Matters that blogging, at least student blogs, seem to have not gotten yet. I expect that will change at some point in the future, but I don’t know whether that’s in the next semester or in the next decade.
Also, I think your last comment brings up something worth discussing–people are reading AmhPub and not participating, while that happens far less frequently on Planworld–most people who read it maintain plans. Why do you think that is?
7 Eric Schultz (eschultz10) // Dec 26, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Hopefully your time abroad will lead to the birth of an Argentinean Affairs blog.
8 Dave Ullman (dullman10) // Dec 27, 2008 at 2:02 am
Hey, that’s OK, Sandy - it’s possible that the folks clicking your links visited the page more than once, so we can’t know for sure. We’ll call it even (and thanks for the publicity!).
Now, of course AmhPub is at a disadvantage when it comes to reporting on news stories. But there’s a fairly clear analogy; tons of blogs manned by small groups or individuals are competing with behemoths like the NYTimes and doing so with success. Plus, don’t forget a healthy part of The Student is opinion, life and styles, and sports. There’s no reason why a student should feel compelled to review a movie in The Student as opposed to doing it here.
I agree that blogging (either here or elsewhere) has yet to really solidify as an academic pursuit. I think maybe the informality of the medium makes it that way. But again, there’s no reason why someone couldn’t blog a well-researched, intellectual post. I expect to see it in the future.
As for your last question, I think some students feel a little weird about posting on this site, simply because not many other people are doing it. Hopefully that would be fixed if we were to get 30-40 posts per week. Then, writing a thought and posting it would be no big deal; it would be a fun way to spread an idea. Planworld is, as Rachel says, much more of a community. Users are comfortable with sharing; that is not something AmhPub has been able to accomplish.
Thanks for the comments, guys.
9 Ricardo Bilton (rbilton10) // Jan 2, 2009 at 2:20 am
Wait…so Laff and co are turning everything over to Woody Brown alone? Sounds like a recipe for trouble. How is he going to run things alone?
As a former (albeit brief) user of AmhPub, I should say that a major reason for my departure was the painful lack of customization options. I proposed the addition of things like custom headers way back when Amhpub was first born, and watched in bemused (but unsurprised) curiosity as not only was the addition not made but that the homepage stayed the exact same for the entirety of the summer. Amherst kids are busy, I understand.
I think you can chalk AmhPub’s terminal disease (we will call it that to adhere to David’s argument that its not dead; I know for certain that Esteban Parker posts with enough enthusiasm for the while of the class of 2010) to a few things. For one, its not anonymous. As much damage as anonymous posting can do, you really cannot understate its importance for *honest* discourse at microscopic Amherst.
AmhPub, honestly, never struck me so much a communication tool so much as a pontification tool, another outlet though which the indicator staff could prattle on about some vague topic that only a handful of people care about. People, especially college students, are micromanging things. Amhpub encourages large blocks of text during a time where services like twitter encourage sentences. Folks just don’t have time to write long posts and involve themselves in a new community - unless you compel them enough, that is.
Moreover, most student projects like this (think facebook and *gasp* the daily jolt) are created with expansion in mind. Grausz and crew were putting a lot of effort into something that would never give them anything in return - hence the sites administrative demise. It was destined to remain a amherst-focused network, unused by most and not backed by any sort of financial incentives. Unlike Planworld, not one cares about it enough to fight for its survival.
If I recall, there is some behind the scenes work currently being done to integrate amhpub into a new system an alum is developing as a replacement for the new Athenian. But, again, there doesnt seem to be enough force behind it right now.
Here is a tip: Hire some webdevelopers, some pr people - not solely writers. This isn’t the huffpost, folks - we arent going to visit and post here just to view some featured blogger’s posts. You have to understand the web climate and the direction things are going. Blogging is on the rise, yes, but not everyone has the time nor inclination to blog, especially not in a such a small community with lackluster formatting and nonexistent administrative energy.
I was very excited too see where amhpub could go, but its pretty obvious that it hasn’t gone anywhere.
(Also, Dave, lets pretend that the ten bucks sandy owes is in exchange for you trying out planworld Everyone wins.)
10 irradient (yhuang11) // Feb 20, 2009 at 10:50 am
Find some ways to give writers public recognition. People like being acknowledged for their opinions.
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