I’m afraid I’m going to have to stop reading Mindy McAdams, as she keeps giving me more reading material. Today, she points out another blog I’m going to have to start watching, written by David McHenry, the web editor for the Bakersfield Californian. McHenry points out that he was hired 18 months ago basically to move the site beyond “shovelware” - putting up the newspaper content online at the end of the production cycle. Here’s what they’ve accomplished in 18 months.
- Our most prominent change has been multimedia. We produce 2-3 videos every day on everything from breaking news to features to project pieces. We also have a half-dozen different podcasts that are updated fairly regularly.
- We made a major push for continuous news. Instead of one big posting every night, we have stories going online all day long. We also send out news alerts to help convince our once-daily readers to come back throughout the day for their news.
- We launched a ‘citizen journalism’ effort to get average people writing for both the website and the print paper.
- We developed numerous blogs and grew a sizeable community. Eventually our crack development staff merged those blogs with their new Bakomatic platform, which is a thriving community now.
That’s the professional cutting edge, but there’s nothing to stop college media outlets from doing the same thing. Some leading college news sites are already tracking with what Bakersfield is doing. Others are just getting to the edge of attempting some of these things. Notice how much video Bakersfield is producing.
Our colleague Rob Pongsajapan was at the Indiana Daily Student yesterday, talking with their editors about making their online product better. It’ll be an interesting semester to watch the idsnews.com.
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