In November 2019, the Daily Orange, an independent newspaper run by Syracuse University students, moved from its longtime home at 744 Ostrom Ave. to 230 Euclid Ave. Moving an entire student newsroom is no small feat, and iSchool students were at the heart of the D.O.’s big relocation.

Maeve Rule ’20, an information management and technology major who was also the D.O.’s senior staff data analyst, was part of the digital aspect of the relocation through a social media push for donations. Rule said in an email that her part in the move was also part of a senior capstone project where she had to make a year-long social media plan.

“I focused on creating a yearlong social media plan, creating content to get people to donate, working with the team to automate emails to donors, and providing reporting and analytics on the project,” Rule wrote. 

Rule said she also assisted in creating a new website for Daily Orange donations, but that the principal design of the site came from Kevin Camelo, a rising senior double majoring in information management at the iSchool and graphic design at the Newhouse School. Camelo served as the paper’s digital editor, a position he earned after making Snapchat stories for the D.O.

“The donation site was already outdated,” said Camelo. “So we had a couple of questions to answer for the redesign.”

The Daily Orange’s old site used PayPal to process donations, but the user experience was poor. Camelo said that the old site was also unsecured, which hurt its search engine optimization, or SEO. 

“Before, we had a hard time tracking donors and understanding why they donated,” Camelo said. “Most of them are alumni, but we also have people supporting our work independently.”

The site was not initially meant to coincide with the D.O.’s move, Camelo said. However, a pushback meant that the donation site and social push lined up perfectly with the move to Euclid.

Camelo said that the new house will have more features to help out the D.O.’s digital journalism, such as more space, better monitors and better Wi-Fi connectivity. The paper’s staff conducted a technology audit as part of the move, and Camelo said they found a lot of “hidden gems” that the Daily Orange will reuse.

The newspaper had to move more than staff to Euclid Avenue. The Daily Orange has documented Syracuse University and City of Syracuse history since its founding in 1903, and its archive is a valuable repository for that history, according to Tyler Youngman ’20, archivist and recent graduate of the information technology and management major. 

“Because some of this material is so old, we had to figure out how to package and handle a lot of fragile papers,” Youngman said. 

Youngman said that his role was mostly supervising boxes of old newspapers and other records out of 744 Ostrom’s attic and bookshelves, where generations of Daily Orange staffers preserved them. He will have more space to work in the basement of the Euclid Avenue house.

“I have to figure out how I want to lay it out,” said Youngman. “The old house had a lot of bookshelves, this one doesn’t. I’ll use the same system, but with a different physical arrangement.”

Youngman, who will return to the iSchool for a master’s in library science, said that his experience as the newspaper’s archivist gave him a lot of practical experience in the field.

“It’s teaching me about what it means to run a collection that is so significant to the campus,” Youngman said. He said his favorite item in the archive is the Daily Orange’s inaugural bound collection from 1903-1904.

The Daily Orange runs print editions on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and publishes online content throughout the year. The Society for Professional Journalists named the Daily Orange the best all-around student newspaper in 2018.

Feauture image, from left to right: Tyler Youngman ’20, G’21, Maeve Rule ’20, and Kevin Camelo ’21.