Paid/Volunteer Contributor
In my role as a volunteer contributor (eventually promoted to paid contributor), it was my role to write articles about my assigned NBA teams at my discretion. Luckily, I was offered broad freedom to choose the topic and content of the article, as long as it pertained to my assigned beat. As of this writing, I’ve published more than 75 articles.
My favorite project that I worked on was developing a new way to recap games. Since everyone at FanSided works on a freelance contractor-type basis, sitewide communication and consistent formatting is tough to come by. However, I recommended (and piloted) a consistent format of recaps to my editor, and now we produce a coherent product within a few hours of every single game.
I learned how to perform some basic search engine optimization (SEO), and I also learned the importance of shortcodes. While it is useful to understand how to code, shortcodes make fancy-looking functions easily understandable and accessible by those with a shallower understanding of coding. A lot of MIS, at least to me, is coordinating with people that understand technology minimally.