Challenges for the New Year - reinventing style

Everyone devotes the end of the year to a “year in review,” and then - after the last chorus of Auld Lang Syne is sung - devotes the first week of the new year to some resolutions to “make things better” in the future.

This past week, I spent a couple of hours conversing with Rob Pongsajapan about college media, the reinventing site, and some ideas for the future. Some of the topics we discussed help point the way to some of the challenges we should hope to tackle on this site in the coming year as we attempt to “reinvent college media.” What follows is a short list with some thoughts on each challenge.

1. Facillitate conversation
When we created this site, we hoped it would be a nexus for conversation on the challenges facing college media. We’re part of the way toward that goal, but there’s still much to do in the coming year. Rob and I bounced around some ideas to help further keep the conversation going, and I hope those ideas will begin to see fruition in the coming weeks. As we meet for the Reinventing College Media Summit in February, we’ll see if we can get more “stuff” going.

2. Promote new ways of doing college media
There are some really good ideas floating around there in college media. I know it intuitively. But college media are often isolated that the exchange that needs to happen isn’t happening. As we go into the new year, I hope we can find ways to promote and highlight the ways college media are meeting the challenges head on. Eric Eldon’s “unimedia” initiative is a great start for idea-sharing. There are others. We need to hear them and spread the word. In an age when Internet and multimedia capabilities are available to the smallest college, there’s no reason more schools can’t place themselves at the forefront of experimentation in new media.

3. Challenge the print/broadcast/online divide
Ten years into the “convergence” age, there’s still a lot of mistrust, misunderstanding, and apprehension about the online world. As Rob pointed out in an earlier comment, students still see the “byline” in the paper as the ultimate validation for their efforts. Hopefully, this site can help change that attitude among advisers *and* students. Does that mean we push “online publication” as the ultimate? No way. But old attitudes need to change to see the potential in new avenues of “publication.”

4. Examine the current state of flux in college media
The past six months have been a season of “wailing and gnashing of teeth” among professional media (especially print). There’s a mountain of data about the changes and challenges facing the professional media world. But where’s the mountain of data for college media? There’s a desperate need for us to move beyond rhetorical flourish to concrete data. The absence of such data makes our masthead - reinventing college media - somewhat dubious. A patient needs more than a diagnosis. Someone needs to take the pulse, do some blood work, and maybe put the patient under a CAT scan. Only then can a proper regimen of treatment be drawn up.

Thoughts? The comments are open.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite