When Andrew Flynn and Mike Nardella were undergraduates at Boston College, they realized that their peers wanted to stay informed about school news but did not have the time to go through all the student publications to do so.

Flynn and Nardella founded BCstreak, a hyper local email service in which people sign up to receive an email containing 20 to 25 links of articles pertaining to what’s happening on campus.

He and Flynn are now in charge of StreakMedia, the parent company, and have expanded the service to several colleges across the country, including New York University and Stanford University. They are working on creating a chapter for Syracuse University called SyracuseStreak. Flynn said they would have a full-blown launch at the end of the month.

“That’s why it’s called a streak, because it’s like naked news — very concise, just the links,” Nardella said.

Flynn said they do not write the articles they put into the emails. He said they work closely with student publications and use their articles in the emails. Flynn added that their email service dramatically increased readership for the local news outlets.

“Instead of students trying to search for the news, we bring it from them,” Flynn said.

He said they have approximately 8,000 people signed up for the service.

Nardella said it took some time to set up BCstreak and the other chapters, calling it “a very slow, gradual process.” He said it started out as fulfilling a need, but it became more serious when more and more people were signing up.

“I would count every day in the process as starting up, because now we’re starting up, but at much larger scale and not just BC,” Nardella said. “It’s a day by day process.”

Although they have been working on the email service for a while, Nardella said they run into issues every day. At the beginning, he and Flynn had to curate all the content on their own. Now, they have become very efficient at gathering articles for the emails and Nardella added that their followers also send them links to articles they can use.

“From the beginning, it was definitely hard when we were doing everything manually,” he said. “As we grew, we found out that our subscribers were more than willing to help us out with the curating process.”

Published on January 14, 2014 at 2:50 am

Contact Ellen: ekmeyers@syr.edu | @ellenkmeyers