Tufts Roundtable Commons, an interactive news website created and run by a group of Tufts students, has reached 200 bloggers and users. Since the website's redesign in October 2010, the average number of visits per month has increased to just under 9,000.
The website, trcommons.org, which brings together hundreds of blogs by members of the Tufts community including students, alumni and faculty, addresses topics ranging from campus and international news to how to brew your own beer or plan a trip to Paris. It also features a small audio section where bloggers can post their own podcasts.
Graduating senior Shabazz Stuart, co-founder and president of Tufts Roundtable, the organization that encompasses both the Tufts Roundtable Commons website and the Tufts Roundtable magazine, said that the organization plans to make the website larger despite its successful figures.
"Our number one priority is to continue to expand," Stuart said. "There are a lot of bloggers at Tufts and in the larger Tufts community, and we want to find all of them."
Rising junior Aeden Pillai, webmaster of Tufts Roundtable Commons, echoed the organization's goal.
"Our commitment has always been to foster a conversation by those connected in some way to the Tufts community," he commented in an April post on the website.
Indeed, this mission has characterized the website's evolution over the course of the past few years. The website was originally created to support Tufts Roundtable, a quarterly political magazine started by Stuart and fellow graduating seniors Sam Wallis and Chas Morrison during their sophomore year.
"We wanted to create a nonpartisan political magazine," Morrison said. "There was no common space for students to have a discourse. Tufts [Democrats] have the Public Forum, the Republicans have [The] Primary Source. We founded Tufts Roundtable to be the first step in creating that larger space for campus."
But the founders soon decided that the organization needed an online, not just print, presence.
"We quickly realized that [a] magazine was insufficient for creating campus discourse, so we launched a website," Stuart said.
Although they originally did not have sufficient resources to create a comprehensive website, the team subsequently created a second version of the site. Then, in the summer of 2010, the team received a grant which enabled them to hire professional help in overhauling the website to its current form.
Over the course of this process, the Tufts Roundtable magazine and the Commons website have been somewhat differentiated from one another. "At first, a big part of the website was just hosting content from the magazine — it was just to download the PDF of the magazine. Then we started off a community of bloggers, including students, faculty and people abroad. It became an independent community that was separate from the magazine and created specifically for the website," Morrison said.
Today, the magazine still maintains a separate website, which can be found at tuftsroundtable.org.
"Originally, the magazine's focus was on politics, and we try to catch all kinds of things, but it really was an unexpected thing, and when we launched the redesign, it was continuously an experiment," Pillai said.
There is still, however, some connection between the two. Both fall under the umbrella of the organization Tufts Roundtable, of which Stuart is the president. "I'm the president of the whole organization. The magazine on a day-to-day basis is managed by others and they do 99 percent of the work, so I've taken a lot of time with the Commons. There are two different staffs, and I'm the link between the two," he said.
Stuart and Morrison both said that although they are graduating, they have no doubt that the magazine and website will continue at full force in the coming year. "They are totally self-sufficient. Sam and I don't have daily ties to the Roundtable. Shabazz publicizes, but now it's evolved even beyond what he had in mind. It'll definitely survive, and I know that it'll be in great hands," Morrison said.
Stuart added that because one can contribute to online media from any location, he will be able to continue to support the Common even after he leaves Tufts.
There is also interaction and exchange between contributors to the Commons and to the magazine. "The magazine does pursue people who write on the website and might track them down," Stuart said.
Pillai added that, similarly, they are trying to get writers from the magazine to contribute to the website as well.
There are a wide variety of options for individuals who wish to blog on the Commons website, Pillai explained. If someone already has a blog, the Commons can syndicate it, meaning that updates to the personal blog will automatically be posted on the Commons website. Numerous student groups, such as Brand Haiti and Tufts Energy forum, have used this option to help spread their message to a wider audience.
Becoming a blogger on the website is relatively easy. "You go to the website, sign up and then you're ready to go," Pillai said. The greater struggle, however, is to convince people to post continuously after their initial commitment to be a blogger.
Stuart explained that as a general rule, on any social networking site, 80 percent of the content comes from only 20 percent of the users, and this is true for the Commons as well.
"We have a core group and an auxiliary group," Stuart said.
Nonetheless, Stuart said, one of the main advantages of the Commons is that it gives wider visibility to individual bloggers. "In the end," he said, "it is all about audience. Writing online has the problem of lack of audience. We try to give people a central place to post. Blogging gives people a higher degree of freedom compared to an op-ed. But it's all about audience, and this could be a new way to go."
