The NIU Huskies and New Media

Way, way back in the day it was pretty hard to follow Northern Illinois football if you weren't there every single game.  The amount of media coverage was scarce, even well into the last decade when the Huskies started turning heads around college football.

There would be the occasional article in the Daily Chronicle or the Northern Star, but that would be it.  There really wasn't anything for the hardcore Huskie fans like myself.  That's why I decided to create Red and Black Attack in September 2007.  My inspiration for this was reading entertaining articles on what is now Black Heart Gold Pants and wanting to match what these Iowa fans were doing.  Back then there were virtually no blogs out there for smaller schools like NIU.

Before I became part of the SB Nation platform, it was really easy to start up a blog on google blogger.  I decided to move here because of the serious limitations that the GB template put writers under.  Nowadays, pretty much anybody can sign up to either GB or Wordpress and start a blog.  It's not rocket science.  They key to being successful is never about how pretty your blog looks, but about the content.  You could have the most amazingly designed website on the web, but if the content is crap, nobody is going to read it.

I've been working my butt off writing on this blog consistently.  It truly is a grind and is a new challenge to the media types out there.  The traditional media has been forced recently to tap into blogging themselves and social media just to catch up with the advancement in technology.  The Daily Chronicle did an awesome thing with the launch of HuskieWire.com.  It's a great website and I guarantee a LOT more people read that website than the receive the physical DC paper every morning.  Even the official website has a blog called Huskie Happenings, that really needs to be marketed more and have some sort of feed associated with it.

Social media like twitter and facebook just add to the chaos.  Sure you can use something like google reader to keep track of RSS feeds, but twitter is the mainstream way of doing this now.  If you aren't reaching out to social media then you aren't hitting the maximum amount of possible people that would want to read your articles.

I mean, just look how far we have come since the early part of the last decade.  Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, New Media, etc. are all fairly new terms in this constantly changing environment.  Hell, I'm just a hardcore fan that happens to like writing about my beloved Huskies.  I'm no reporter, I just want to provide the masses with every single piece of Red and Black info that you can find on the internet. 

Anybody can have a voice now through any type of these medias and make an impact.