Innovation in College Media

Rich Cameron has been talking with California advisers and students about the online product. He came away with a couple of good insights - Web Watch 7: Not enough time; not enough design. I'll point you to the first now, and I'll have more to say about the other later.

The No. 1 excuse I hear from advisers as to why their student publications have not gone online or are AWOL in updates is lack of time. Their students are spending all their time simply putting out print editions. But when I talk to students and share the concept of having staffs submit their stories THROUGH the online site --something you can do with a content management tool such as College Publisher-- and cutting the online production effort in half, they totally get it.

If you treat the online publication as something you do AFTER you do the work for your print edition then, yeah, I understand not having time. But if you make working on your online publication something the whole staff does as part of the whole production process you'll find that you have lots of time.

To which I say, Amen, brother! Online staffs have too long been an afterthought in the media mix, as in "after the paper is laid out, we'll shovel the content onto the web site." College news organizations should be able to try out new techniques for making the process work better. I like Rich's suggestion of having students write their stories in the online Content Management System (CMS) to make it a part of the print production process. That's the way College Publisher was originally designed to work.

Of course, that is difficult for those schools still producing HTML sites. Then you have to find someone, usually just one person, to handle the online site alone. I'm still amazed to hear of schools without online sites still planning to go that direction. (emphasis added)

I want to say this in terms that anyone will understand: ANY school that is NOT online that is considering putting up a plain HTML site to host its online presence is doing a grave disservice to its students. SHUT DOWN THE MS FRONTPAGE AND STEP AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER!

As I've discussed elsewhere, there are far too many options for hosting a Content Management System, from open-source to College Publisher, to even allow the argument that a plain HTML site is worth investing time on in 2006. Heck, even if you have to sign up for a free Blogger account and start posting your stories on a modified weblog, it's better than a plain static HTML page.

To use an analogy that print advisers will understand: Would you consider using hot lead type to lay out your newspaper today? That's about the equivalent of trying to do a news site with plain HTML. From a training perspective, your students who lay out the web site might learn a lot about HTML, but they'll learn precious little about using a content management system, which is the way news outlets put their material on the web these days.

Any school that is currently using static HTML web pages to host its online news site should upgrade to some sort of CMS. Any school that is considering starting an HTML-based site should banish that idea from the drawing board.

"But isn't any site better than no site?" you might ask. In this case, I'm not so sure. It might be better to stick with no site until you can develop a dynamic web site.