TweenTribune was a free,
not-for-profit
A not-for-profit or non-for-profit organization (NFPO) is a Legal Entity, legal entity that does not distribute surplus funds to its members and is formed to fulfill specific objectives.
While not-for-profit organizations and Nonprofit organ ...
online
newspaper
A newspaper is a Periodical literature, periodical publication containing written News, information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as poli ...
for children aged 8–15. It is updated daily with stories from the
Associated Press
The Associated Press (AP) is an American not-for-profit organization, not-for-profit news agency headquartered in New York City.
Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association, and produces news reports that are dist ...
that are chosen based on relevancy to pre-adolescents. Kids can post comments to the stories which are moderated by their teachers, and teachers can use the site as a resource for meeting
No Child Left Behind
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was a 2002 United States Act of Congress promoted by the presidential administration of George W. Bush. It reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and included Title I provision ...
requirements for reading, writing and computer skills. The site first appeared on November 21, 2008.
In October 2017, the content was moved and is now available a
Teachers , Smithsonian Magazine It is displayed on the educational resources page and on the learning page. Much of the content still exists, but educators can no longer assign content to students.
TweenTribune has been featured in articles in the ''
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...
'', ''
Good Housekeeping
''Good Housekeeping'' is an American lifestyle media brand that covers a wide range of topics from home decor and renovation, health, beauty and food, to entertainment, pets and gifts. The Good Housekeeping Institute which opened its "Experiment ...
'' and ''
Family Circle
''Family Circle'' was an American women's magazine that covered topics such as homemaking, recipes and health. It was published from 1932 until the end of 2019. Originally distributed at supermarkets, it was one of the " Seven Sisters," a grou ...
'' magazine.
Financial model
TweenTribune.com was a
proof-of-concept
A proof of concept (POC or PoC), also known as proof of principle, is an inchoate realization of a certain idea or method in order to demonstrate its feasibility or viability. A proof of concept is usually small and may or may not be complete ...
model for new ways to fund
journalism
Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree of accuracy. The word, a noun, applies to the journ ...
online. The site employed a series of previously untried methods for building audience and revenue.
Business model
To achieve sustainability, the site used a group of strategies to reduce costs:
# As of January 2010, all content was provided by outside sources. Stories come from the Associated Press, while comments were generated by children in the form of
user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), emerged from the rise of web services which allow a system's User (computing), users to create Content (media), content, such as images, videos, audio, text, testi ...
(UGC).
# Editing of comments was provided by teachers, so editing is distributed among users as a means of reducing cost rather than centralizing editing with a paid staff. This is an example of distributive editing (DE).
# Primary source code was provided by
Drupal
Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...
, a free,
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
code content management system. The site also depended upon other open-source applications, such as
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
,
Apache
The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...
,
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...
and
MySQL
MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...
.
History
Alan Jacobson,
Jacobson's bio on BrassTacksDesign.com
/ref> president o
BrassTacksDesign
created TweenTribune as a way of helping his 10-year-old daughter with her homework.
Launched on Nov 21, 2008, the site had little traffic in its first year. In October 2009 page view
In web analytics and website management, a pageview or page view, abbreviated in business to PV and occasionally called page impression, is a request to load a single HTML file (web page) of an Internet site. On the World Wide Web, a page reque ...
s began to jump dramatically after a new promotional campaign was launched that marketed the site directly to teachers — a strategy that had not been tried before.
As of May 2010, the site received 3.4 million page views per month, and 26,000 teachers were registered. TweenTribune was used in 50,000 classrooms in the U.S., Australia, Canada and Japan.
In 2017, the site was discontinued. Content was incorporated into the online Smithsonian website. Educational and learning modules exist, but the model for specific daily updates geared to the Tween years is no longer provided.
References
External links
{{official website, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/
American news websites