This article is a little strayed from the usual film and television coverage on the blog. Nevertheless, I wanted to share it.

A little background: I’m part of the contributing writer program for USA Today College. The job is to write short articles (300-400 words) covering local interest college-related stories. After a few weeks of stalling and not knowing what to write about, I finally wrote up my first story. It was a piece talking about the a new course called Fundamentals of Digital Media that had been implemented at my college, Texas State University, for mass communication majors.

So I was browsing through my RSS newsfeed when I decided to check the USA Today College tab. I visited the main website and scrolled through the recently added stories. I was a little on nerves since I had submitted a story to USA Today college at the start of the week and had gotten no response back.

My eyes caught something as I scrolled through. There was my article on the recently published stories tab. Clicking on the article in excitement, I saw that it had been published on Thursday, February 27th. It had been published for three days and I hadn’t even noticed!

Although I was filled with excitement (I have an article in USA Today!) I didn’t know whether to tweet it out or not. It was Saturday night so surely not many people would see it. With hesitant fingers I clicked ‘tweet’ on my Twitter application and the article made it’s way to the big ol’ internet.

I didn’t expect much. I was hoping that at least one of my friends would favorite the tweet.

Low and behold, the tweet quickly gained traction and started being shared.

My mental thoughts: “Okay this is good. My friends have a lot of followers so it may get a few views.

Then it stared to go even further…

They have thousands of followers. My article was being shared (and had the potential to be read) by thousands of people. Once my college professors started tweeting out the link to the article things picked up speed. Their tweets got a lot of favorites and retweets. The article started being shared more and more from each of their tweets. By 11pm, five hours after my first tweet at 6pm, the article had been retweeted  and favorited over a dozen times.

Several of the lecturers and professors in the School of Mass Communication at Texas State loved the article (and some even pulled quotes from it!). I was beyond trilled and did a little victory dance. A piece I had written had gotten published on a national news website!

Despite this upcoming week being ridden with midterms, I can walk through those doors to the School of Mass Comm with a sense of accomplishment. It’s only one article, nevertheless I’m happy with the overwhelmingly positive response to it. The first of hopefully many USA Today articles! Go check the article out here

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