Interview Pt.2
HP: Is there anything you’d like to change about your online presence?
SB: Right now the magazine is published in a blog format. At some point I think we should switch to a magazine layout. The problem with blogs is that the entries are published in a chronological order. However, the importance of news published on Crossroads is not necessarily chronological.
I’m also starting to receive proposals for advertisements. This could be an interesting development. Up until now, Crossroads completely depends on the EJC’s support.
HP: Which tools do you use to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the Internet?
SB: It’s all about readership – the more people you reach, the better. Our goal is also to create a sense of community. We allow our readers to post comments, send newsletters once in a while to people who have subscribed to our mailing list and try to interact our readers whenever possible.
[Here is an example. An article published on Crossroads brought comments from a reader, the editor and the author of the article]:
source: Crossroads
What I like about the comments section is that many comments are written in languages other than English. I think this is great for a website targeting expatriates. We’ve had comments in Spanish, Hungarian, French, Italian, Dutch of course and even Limburg dialect. I’m very proud of them, because this is exactly what I think Crossroads is all about: bringing the international community together. I see English as a practical tool, because it is a language that most people throughout the world can read and understand fairly well, but I often dream about offering writers the possibility to publish stories in their own language, or perhaps making Crossroads an English/Dutch bilingual website.
We also invite our readers to share the stories via sharing tools that are very easy to use:
Also, we try to use multimedia as illustrations to the articles. We have a media producer at the EJC who regularly records lectures and conferences in Maastricht and we always make sure to make the video clips available on Crossroads as well. Other video films (via YouTube or Google Video) are very useful too, and so are Flickr pictures released with a Creative Commons licence or the photographs submitted by our writers.
As a matter of fact, our large choice of photographs brings many visitors to our magazine. Many people discover Crossroads by doing image searches on the Internet (via Google Images for example).
