It has been a long and challenging year—and it’s not even August quite yet—but in addition to all of the work we do on a daily basis that is visible to everyone, we have been hard at work behind the scenes to in most ways completely revamp the Vanguard.
First and foremost, we have a new website—finally!!! Finally, because it has been in the works for several years now. Finally, because the last website was ten years ago, having been designed back in 2014 and it was slow and notoriously clunky.
We rolled it out hot on Friday afternoon—it’s still a bit wonky on the back end. And there’s actually a whole feature that is not up yet that should be up on Monday.
And there will be little tweaks here or there—and if you have problems or suggestions post them in the comment section so I can add them to the list.
I need to thank our staffers Brinda Kalita and Madison Whittemore who along with new board member Bob Adams worked really hard with the web development team at Uptown Studios to get this project to the finish line.
I’m not sure who was more relieved—me or Brinda—to get this just about done. Brinda, who has been our Internship Coordinator this year after a year as an intern, is leaving us in August because she’s going to be starting law school at USC. We are really excited for Brinda but sad to lose her.
If it were not for her hard work, we would not have a new website right now.
The website highlights the various segments of the Vanguard. My focus will continue to be heavily on Davis issues and multiple commentaries each week.
We also have three main programs that have continued to expand.
First, our Court Watch project continues. We generally have between 30 and 40 interns. We have them located in places like Davis, Sacramento, Alameda, San Francisco, Los Angeles and even Burlington, VT (long story).
We have much of our dedicated staff working on that project with the interns. We have currently three staff dedicated—and when Brinda moves on, Jojo Kofman will take over her spot as Internship Coordinator and we will have Madison Whittemore and Audrey Sawyer, who has been an intern now for two years nearly and will be taking over as assistant intern coordinator.
Madison and Audrey work with the interns after they leave the court room on their articles and Cres Vellucci will continue as our court watch editor for a sixth year.
In addition to the court watch program, we have the Vanguard Incarcerated Press. That project now has its own dedicated page and section on the front page. The director is Dr. Joan Parkin and we have progressed very far this year thanks to a grant from the Sparkplug Foundation.
We’ve been able to launch a monthly newsletter that we are mailing into the prisons. We also now have an all-incarcerated editorial board of Angie Gordon, Razor Babb, and Jamel Walker. And we are still working on more grants to continue developing our incarcerated journalist training program.
The third section is the Everyday Injustice Podcast where we publish weekly discussions with all sorts of folks who work in criminal justice reform on a whole range of topics.
Two more big announcements, we now have a team member who is working exclusively on grants which we see as part of the long-term financial sustainability for the Vanguard.
We also now have a social media team led by Emeline Crowder, who is also taking over the daily social media posts as well as the newsletter—Monday through Friday—which takes yet another duty off my hands.
I will be now focused on my daily article, managing the staff, fundraising, and outreach. It’s still a big job, but I’m really excited that, for the first time, the Vanguard will be almost entirely run by people other than me.
This has been a challenging year for sure, but while the changes probably won’t be that noticeable to most of the folks, they have been huge for us internally.
Thanks, and remember to leave your feedback on the new site below.
The new website looks nice but still has too many ads. When trying to access the Vanguard I often can’t get it to load. I get a message saying “This webpage was reloaded because it was using significant energy”.
I remember the days when there would be 50 comments by 9am. There were robust conversations. The fact now that comments often sit in the moderation queue for hours kills any chance of that ever happening again. Where are the several conservative commenters that used to post? Having diverse views used to generate more commenting. I thought progressives were supposed to be all about diversity.
What you need are the Alan Millers, Ron Oertels, SOD’s and Frankly’s to return.
There is definitely a server issue that I have on the list. The ads are on the list, my staff all identified that as a concern.
The ads are on the list, my staff all identified that as a concern.
As in the former format, ”d like to be able to click on “comments” (when there are any) to go to them without having to scroll through the original article.
I agree. The comments are often better than the article.
I am assuming you guys can’t edit your comments – correct?
Nope, no edit feature.
Thanks.
I also miss the recent and past comments box.
Will let you know if this comment can be edited.
The site is much faster to load. I think the old one had a virus. I did like that the old site’s front page was broken down into sections. You can still navigate the sections with the drop down box but it’s less efficient (like you can’t see if their are comments for recent articles with a quick front page browse).
There is no method to format comments like in the old version. So far I haven’t noticed pages refreshing while I am composing comments. With the old site pages would frequently refresh on mobile browsers while I wrote my comments. I had to employ a cumbersome workaround to avoid losing what I was writing.
I surmise that slow loading times with the old site were the result of a too complex web page design. The new simpler pages have sped up loading times.