Holy Family part of Inquirer’s Student Union 34

Christopher Wink

The Inquirer launched Student Union 34, an offshoot of Philly.com targeted at and produced by college students, on July 1. The site comprises 34 colleges in and around Philadelphia, with news, features and op-ed pieces from students with the help of some Inquirer editors.

The college education blog from the New York Times introduced the site to its readers, noting 34 has content from all the four-year schools of our region, including “lesser-known schools like Holy Family.” While a few of the bigger universities like Temple and Penn have students generating content, Holy Family University at Grant Avenue and Academy Road, is also on the list.

But that doesn’t mean anyone is representing the college by writing under the Holy Family mantle.

Currently, though still in its infancy, the only school that seems to be generating regular content by student contributors is Temple. Other news is being aggregated from student publications, university sources and the Inquirer itself — staff-written pieces from the newspaper.

While content from other schools may come online, Holy Family may not be next. The school doesn’t have a student newspaper — a cultivator of talent and interest at universities that those behind 34 used to find student contacts.

While the site has generated some fanfare and features a cool Flash map tracking the region’s 34 four-year institutions (depicted above), as the CityPaper staff blog suggested, there isn’t a great deal of information being created that would interest outsiders, but the platform, it seems, is the news.

And we might not get any from Holy Family anytime soon.

Editor Shannon McDonald contributed to this report.