Belated thanks to PioLog

Cary Young (’10) runs independent blog about LC

by Sanne Stienstra

This summer, instead of merely sitting around and enjoying the fine Portland weather, Cary Young (’10) started an untitled blog that focuses on the happenings in and around the Lewis & Clark community. The blog, lclark.us, is intentionally not registered as an official student group and “does not have an agenda,” according to Young’s inaugural post on the website.

“I wanted a place on the Internet, but outside the jurisdiction of the College, as an entity where people could discuss the school and talk about positive things and events that are coming up,” Young said. “I really don’t want it to be a sort of Juicy Campus, gripe-y type thing because I don’t agree that that’s ever productive.”

The idea to start an independent blog about events and issues pertinent to members of the LC community came to Young when he was blogging for the Admissions Office’s “Real Life” journal last year.

“I liked the idea of having a day-to-day account of life at school, but I really didn’t like how much administrative control Admissions kept over those blogs,” Young said. “As an advertising tool that’s totally cool, but I felt like for my purposes it could be done a lot better independently.”

Young has written about everything from the best drinking fountains on campus to the cheapest way to get textbooks, changes in student employment and the swine flu. Most of Young’s posts are based on facts and research that he has compiled in his free time.

For a piece called “meal plan math, or why it’s better not to think about things like this,” Young calculated the average cost of a meal at the Bon, arriving at the conclusion that it would be almost $1,000 cheaper to purchase 14 meals a week in cash instead of through a meal plan.

Since its birth in August, the website has seen positive responses from LC staff, like Forest Area Director David Rosengard and Public Communications. When Young wrote a post that revealed a few faults in the College’s online sexual harassment training, the College took Young’s suggestions seriously and began working with the company to fix the errors.

“Basically the company that we contracted with to write the online quiz for the sexual harassment awareness training is not very good at writing software. If you do a few things in your browser, you can find out all the answers, because they didn’t write it right,” Young said.

Young’s post, entitled “how not to use javascript,” estimated that the College pays this company between $5,000 and $7,500 each year for its service. “If money is paid to write a web application that functions as a quiz, the quiz-takers better damn well not be able to just crack it open and look at the answers,” wrote Young.

Another post pointing out problems with the search engine on LC’s new website resulted in similar adjustments. “The post basically lit a fire to change the way the search was run on the website,” Young said. “It’s still not perfect and it’s still not what I would like ideally but the fact that I was just able to write an opinion article and a bunch of staff members that I didn’t know implemented [changes] days later was really cool.”

While Young has written most of the posts on the blog, he has a few contributors who write occasionally and he is hopeful about getting more. “I am interested in anyone who wants to contribute—either once, or frequently, or whatever,” he said. “And for any reason, like to plug an event or anything, as long as it’s related to Lewis & Clark, I am interested in having it on the website.”

Besides finding more writers to post on the blog, Young hopes that these “unofficial musings” will serve to complement already existing media and information-sharing networks on campus.
“I don’t see it at all as a replacement for the PioLog or KLC or anything like that,” Young said. “I want to keep it separate from Student Activities, but I don’t want it to really be a competitor as much as something that aids in cohesion.”