Author: Harry Jones

Andrea Mohns-Brillaud has led the Boston University Figure Skating Club to back-to-back national championships.

When she was a student at BU, she skated on the team. 21 years later, she became coach. Then, the club were a non-competitive team with no history of success.

Now, they are one of the country’s premier figure skating clubs.

I spoke to Mohns-Brillaud about her transition from skater to coach and how she shaped the success of the team.

Mohns-Brillaud speaks to her skaters.

This interview is part of a larger story I wrote for BU Today, titled, “Athleticism and Artistry Hallmark of BU Figure Skating Club.” The full story can be found here.

As it was part of my work as a writer for BU Today, they sent their own photographer, who captured the above image. (Photo credit: Maddie Maholtra/BU Today.)

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Welcome to my second newstracker blog, a blog that puts Boston.com’s website under the microscope.

For my first post, I discussed how much of the homepage was dominated by Boston Red Sox news. Today is no different. Take a look:

Fairly significant headlines such as a bomb threat at the Clinton household and a tornado in (fairly) nearby Rhode Island are lost within the Red Sox mania. But then again, it’s hardly surprising. The World Series is underway and the city is doing its best to make sure you can’t forget about it, largely thanks of a “GO SOX” light display on the Prudential Centre.

I am impressed, however, with their choice of headline. It would have been easy for them to leave a match report on the front of their page, that’s certainly what many major Boston publications have done. They know their audience, and therefore they know that many sports fans will have first visited a sports website check the match report and then will come to Boston.com for additional reading. By leading with “9 thoughts about the Red Sox’ clutch victory in Game 1,” they’ve provided exactly that.

This week, I have also been studying the impact of social media on the website. I think this is something that Boston.com needs to work on. You have to scroll right to the bottom of the homepage to find links to Boston.com’s respective social media accounts. I was hoping that there would be a little more social engagement once you clicked on the articles, but they were also light on the social media front.

As you can see here, there are no links to Boston.com’s social media pages. If you scroll to the bottom of the article, this little tab pops up:

The problem with this is that many readers exit the article as soon as they reach the end and therefore will not even see this tab. If Boston.com wants to maximize its social media following, they need to provide clearer links to their social pages.

The Boston Red Sox have just eliminated the Yankees from this year’s postseason.

Boston sport fans, read it again and again. Few sentences will bring you greater joy.

It is, therefore, unsurprising that articles relating to last night’s triumph dominate Boston.com’s homepage, as you can see below.

While I agree that the victory is newsworthy and deserves a lot of attention, I am not such a fan of the way in which the five separate Red Sox articles are almost scattered around the site amongst non-sporting news. I think that, when you have several sports articles published in one morning, they are best left in one section. Sports fans will still read them and non-sports fans do not have to navigate through an ocean of Red Sox analysis to find their news.

One thing I do love about the Boston.com website is the way they highlight each article’s specific topic in red above the headline. Those having a quick scan of the website, perhaps to lazy to read each headline individually, can be grabbed by a topic they’re interested in. However, why they haven’t written ‘Colin Kaepernick’ rather than ‘NFL’ on the fifth article down is a mystery to me. Articles on Kaepernick draw an audience that stories on the sport alone do not, and they should have capitalized upon this.

One thing that bugs me about the Boston.com website is the amount of advertising. There is an advert that takes up the entire page between each section. If the sections were longer, I would be more understanding, but each one contains a flimsy five or six articles. Surely this could be easily solved by moving the advertisements to the side of the page, which right now is completely blank.