Reflections on my first content strategy project
EHU Times is a student media platform that has been running for years. Interviews, news, opinion pieces, creative writing, event recaps — students were genuinely producing content, and a lot of it.
My first project for my Content Strategy Master’s was figuring out why. The audit that changed how I saw the problem I went in expecting to find a content gap — too few posts, wrong topics, not enough frequency. What I found instead was the opposite: 195 pages, formats ranging from long essays to quick announcements, topics covering everything from student life to travel to university news. The problem wasn’t quantity. It was that none of it worked as a system. The platform wasn’t missing content. It was missing a reason for the content to exist. Posts scored well individually — clearly written, well-structured. But there were over 30 editorial rubrics, most used once or twice. Tone jumped between formal, blog-like, and journalistic with no logic. 99.5% of the content was in Russian, in an international university. And for a huge share of posts, I genuinely couldn’t tell what they wanted the reader to do, think, feel, click, show up somewhere? It wasn’t clear. Good parts. Broken whole. That became the line I kept coming back to.
The thing that actually surprised me I expected the language issue to be the big finding. 99.5% Russian on a platform meant to serve an international community — that’s a real accessibility problem, and it deserved space in the project. But the finding that hit harder was how often content had no clear purpose. Not bad content — just directionless content. Published because there was something to publish, not because there was something to say or do. That’s a much softer problem than a language gap, and in some ways a harder one to fix. You can translate a post. You can’t easily give a team of student volunteers a shared sense of why their work matters and who it’s for — not without actually talking about it, building it together, writing it down.
The audit told me what was on the platform. It couldn’t tell me why those decisions were made, what the team cared about, or what they imagined EHU Times could become. My recommendations ended up being practical — recurring formats, a short tone of voice guide, priority content areas, basic multilingual summaries. Things a small student team could actually implement.
What this project gave me I started with a vague feeling that something was off. I finished with a specific, evidence-based explanation of what that something was and a set of ideas for what to do about it. That’s what a content audit actually is. Not a spreadsheet. A way of seeing a platform clearly for the first time. And honestly? That shift from “something feels wrong” to “here’s exactly what’s wrong and here’s why” — is what made this feel like the beginning of actually doing content strategy, not just reading about it.
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