Project

The American Society of News Editors (ASNE) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1922 to promote fair principled American journalism. The organization has several supported programs, such as the High School Journalism Initiative and Sunshine Week.

The High School Journalism Initiative program supported two main websites, the hsj.org and my.hsj.org.

• hsj.org was an education site for high school journalists.
• my.hsj.org was the largest free online hosting and content management system for youth news. It hosted more than 4,000 student news organizations.

I worked with the engineering teams at AppTheory, a web development consultant that creates portal solutions based on DotNetNuke and SharePoint platforms, to design and implement the themes for hsj.org and my.hsj.org websites.

After I co-founded Schecter & Co. with my partner, Scott Schecter, I got the privilege to work with ASNE again. We single handedly designed, developed, maintained, supported, and handled operations of hsj.org and my.hsj.org. I helped create the overall site information architecture as well as the custom theme creator used by student news organizations.

The theme creator allowed each school newspaper site to be customized in many different layouts. Theme customization options included: topic, colors, header image(s), background image(s), and more. All combined there were over 100,000 different unique permutations the students could choose from to create a unique look and feel for their school newspaper.