Blog Team

This page is useful to those Writing Blog Posts at the McNair Center.

The summer 2017 Blog Team consists of Diana Carranza and Anne Dayton.

Every member of the McNair Staff is encouraged to consider writing a blog article. In spring 2017, Catherine Kirby, Taylor Jacobe, and Eliza Martin were the Blog Team. Other staff with posts published or in progress include Carlin Cherry, Dylan Dickens, Julia Wang, Jake Silberman, Avesh Krishna, Ramee Saleh and Meghana Gaur.

During academic year 2016-17, the Blog Team Structure included an online editor (Taylor Jacobe) The position of graphics editor was also proposed, but never filled. Students who wrote blog posts were required to take a turn as peer editor and review other students' content.

Two weekly round-up blog posts on entrepreneurship and innovation were published in fall 2016. Meghana Gaur and Avesh Krishna took on the roles of entrepreneurship and innovation weekly round-up writers, respectively. Each week we did a weekly round-up of articles posted on the web on the topics of entrepreneurship and innovation (one post each). Weekly Roundup and Weekly Round-up Resources (old) provide resources. The McNair Center only published the weekly round-up in entrepreneurship in spring 2017

Team Structure

The Blog Team is encouraged to collaborate.

It was proposed that the Blog Team have meetings at least once a month to generate ideas, set goals, and talk about progress during the academic year. This way, the entire team can be on the same page about what kind of content is wanted, what everyone else is working on, and potential opportunities for collaboration.

Student Leadership Positions

During the academic year, these leaders will be appointed by Ed and Anne. Student leaders are responsible for logging and documenting their work in a manner that allows for easy transition once a new student takes over the position.

• Graphics Editor Responsible for approving all choices for blog post graphics, checking that we have permission to use them and that they are appropriate based on the content of the post. This editor is also responsible for approving the captions on photos. The Graphics Editor will also check once the blog post has been published that it has the correct citations, caption, and appearance in WordPress. This position is currently open. Let us know if you’re interested.
• Online Editor Responsible for approving the blog posts once they are in WordPress right before they are published. The Online Editor checks to make sure that the Yoast SEO and Readability plugins are rating the page at an acceptable level. The Online Editor assures that there is consistency in how we structure posts. The Online Editor is responsible for keeping a running list of what posts we have published and what date they were published. The Online Editor page has important details for the online editor's job. Taylor Jacobe served as online editor in 2016-17.

Two student roles

• Peer Editor: During the academic year, all student blog writers would in turn act as peer content editors. Responsible for editing drafts of blog posts, looking for places where content could be improved, cut, or elaborated upon. The Peer Editors also edit posts for grammar and style. Peer editors will return posts to authors within one shift. During the academic year, see Peer Editor Schedule for available per editors.
• Weekly Round-up Authors: These students would author a weekly post that briefly summarized what other entrepreneurship and innovation blog writers had posted during the preceding week. Round-up authors are responsible for choosing which contact from an established list of blogs to include. They could also include material from other blogs, but these additions would need to be okayed by Anne or Ed. The weekly round-up would be published on Monday mornings, and thus would need to completed and approved no later than noon on Friday.

Approximate length 500 words. Include lots of links. Breadth is more important than depth!