Students searching for local news, events and reviews in the ASU community have a one-stop online resource designed for college life.
CampusSpots.com features student-written articles, reviews and blogs designed to inform and entertain the student body.
Created by two UA alumni, James MacDonald and Steven Sapot, the site is filled with content by ASU students, for ASU students.
Mollie Molumby, a spokeswoman for CampusSpots, said the site started “as an information portal and resource guide for the college community.”
Molumby said the site is a great way for students to find local bars, happy hours and late-night deliveries. She said student reviews on these items help users find the best results.
"Who better to tell us about what's going on in the college community than the college students themselves?" Molumby said.
The creators designed the site based on a concept they wish they had in college, Molumby said.
MacDonald said he wanted to provide content with an in-depth student perspective to ASU.
“There just had to be a better way for college students to find all the resources in the community around them,” he said.
MacDonald said student blogs and movie reviews are the site’s best features for the ASU community.
“Those have been an outstanding hit,” he said.
Videos posted with blogs and articles provide a well-rounded dynamic to the site, he said.
MacDonald said he and Sapot chose ASU as their market because of its size and outstanding growth across four campuses.
“It seemed like the best place in the nation,” he said.
Journalism sophomore Mallory Kydd, an intern for CampusSpots, said the site helps students by compiling local event information.
“There’s just so much going on … it's hard to know about that unless you go out and read all the bulletin boards or ask around,” Kydd said. “All of that is going to be transcribed on [CampusSpots]."
Kydd started in January as the site’s first intern and has seen it rapidly expand, with 10 to 15 contributors this fall.
She said the interns’ blogs engage readers by allowing them to see what the interns do.
“You can get to know them,” she said.
MacDonald said he would like the Web site to grow to include other schools. Currently the site only serves ASU and UA.
“We’d like to go nationwide with it,” he said.
MacDonald plans to take the site into the Southern California market first, then expand to the East Coast.
“We have such a wide array of content,” he said. “We constantly are probing for feedback and are aiming to give our readers whatever they’d like to see.”
Reach the reporter at adam.sneed@asu.edu.
