The Students Behind Our Website Refresh

A couple of summer interns helped D in D put together our new look

Sophia Moore

Two dedicated undergraduates at the University of Virginia spent a good bit of their summer helping to redesign, migrate and relaunch all our web content this summer. The effort was part of a partnership with the Charlottesville-based community radio station WTJU.

Sophia Moore and Jonah Garces-Foley, both interns at WTJU, did a lot of work moving almost 100 show pages from a clunky old system to a snazzy new Squarespace platform.

“Things were a little tedious,” Moore said. “But when the movements became a habit, it was easy to get into the groove.”

Both student-interns often threw on headphones and listened to episodes of Democracy in Danger to stay focused. Moore said “Prison Pipeline,” from way back in Season One, was perhaps her favorite episode.

Jonah Garces-Foley

“It’s a disturbing and important story about the racialized prison system in America,” she said. “And though it’s an earlier episode, it still resonates today.”

Moore and Garces-Foley say they valued their time at WTJU immensely. They did much more than website work, from learning sound design to producing on-air news segments.

“I have a vastly bigger vocabulary and can pick up much more detail within a recorded song,” Garces-Foley said.

Connecting with our content — grunt work though it was — also broadened their horizons.

“I started reading the New York Times and Washington Post regularly this summer,” Garces-Foley said. “And D in D added to this growing sense of my national citizenship. Now I’m a bit of a news junkie, for better or worse.”

Become a news junkie, too! Sign up for our newsletter and subscribe to the show on any podcast app. Then head over to WTJU’s Virginia Audio Collective, which distributes the show, to check out all our sister podcasts.