Full Name: Kevin Zieber, Co-Founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Athens Bread
Hometown: Canton, Ohio
Graduation: June 2011
Major: Online Journalism
What inspired you create Athens Bread?
When I started my senior year, I felt like I’d written for just about every campus publication and in a number of different capacities without finding a place that really seemed like home to me. I thought that there were enough other journalism students like myself who were kind of disillusioned with the options and willing to try something new. I also wanted to try to push something that was long form and web-centric and not confined to the classic constraints of print media.
What was the process like starting your own publication?
Well, I wouldn’t say I’m the authority on this because we’re unique in that we have such low, virtually non-existent production costs. The way I went about getting started was just basically recruiting a few student journalists I knew and thought would be interested in this kind of thing to act as my editorial staff. After that, it was just slowly pulling together people interested in writing for something no one had heard of yet. It’s an ongoing process, but there are a lot of advantages to working with a staff as small as ours.
I think that starting a publication requires a lot of work before you start publicizing. We’re still in the midst of letting people know about our site, but I felt it was important to get our rhythm down and establish ourselves before trying to drive traffic to a site with nothing on it.
What was the hardest thing? Easiest thing?
I’d have to say the hardest thing is ginning up interest. We’re competing in a hugely saturated market in the tiny town of Athens, but I’m confident that we can establish ourselves as an organization that can make significant contributions to the discourse. There really hasn’t been a ton that’s been easy. Finding time to focus on running the publication is difficult between my job and being a full time student. There’s a lot more hard than easy it seems.
What kinds of struggles have you faced during this process?
It’s been hard at times to get people to keep coming back to meetings. It’s been my biggest personal challenge to spend the amount of time that I really need to to make it successful at this point. Balancing between working about 20 hours a week and being a full time student taking 19 credit hours, my time to work on Bread is limited.
What kind of skills do you think you posses that have helped you start and run your own publication?
The decision to start Bread wasn’t really a result of my feeling that I had some special skills, but I guess our collective knowledge of the online journalism world has been helpful. Knowledge and familiarity with front-end coding, plug-ins, widgets, etc.
What do you wish you would have known before starting your own publication?
I wish I would have known just how much time really goes into it.
How has Scripps/Ohio University helped you to create your own publication?
Scripps has been helpful in getting the word out through email. I’ve also had a lot of really positive interactions with professors who are enthusiastic and willing to help however they can.
What advice do you have for other students trying to get involved or starting their own publications?
I sort of kept it under wraps that we were starting a publication, partially because I doubted my own ability to follow through with something like this, so the advice didn’t really come until after we started. I haven’t gotten a ton of practical advice, because every publication is different. There’s been a lot of commiserating between myself and other student editors about people not showing up, missing deadline and those kinds of things, but it’s more a sense of community that I got from other editors than literal advice.