I’m delighted to see this awakening and urge all our peer college media advisers to join the “reinventing” revolution. We in the CICM have been shouting this from the rooftops for some time. A year ago we at Vanderbilt perceived Facebook and its interactive, social-networking brethren sites to be the greatest competition for our students’ media consumption time and attention. We all now know that the line between content creators and audience has evaporated – the “audience” demands its share of the conversation. So, we spent about five months developing InsideVandy.com, a converged student media news/community news/social networking site and permits anyone (even you) to get a free account and participate, and launched it this past September. It’s still a work in progress and is only slowly attracting habitual campus users and winning some recognition – but I agree with Rob Curley’s rule that innovative experiments need 18 months to achieve total success. The point is, we’re about eight months behind where we should be to be as competitive as I would like in this marketplace. I keep looking for other college media sites out there ahead of us, but I am unaware of any that offer students the opportunity to participate beyond posting comments or clicking on surveys. So, with BigLickU on the immediate horizon, the question for college media operations is when will you start your 18-month clock toward innovation success? My hope is that with more folks joining the effort, everyone can benefit and get faster to market using common solutions. I’m confident that the folks at College Publisher are working on this, and we in the CICM are exploring the creation of templates for plug-and-play content management systems that include community journalism/social networking that we can give away for free.

The other comment that has me pondering came from another veteran of student media who I respect, Dave Adams. He expressed an understandable frustration over the focus on college media business before college media education. I have to confess I’ve come to see the two as inextricably linked. Sorry if this sounds melodramatic, but I believe the central issue confronting college media today is the fight for relevance, which is in effect the fight for survival. I realize the dynamics vary from campus to campus, so changes will occur at different speeds, if at all. But consider this: What if your student newspaper keeps plugging along, printing as scheduled (most are weeklies, nationally), updating websites only when the paper is printed, only with the content that is printed (as most nationally continue to do)? As the advertisers and audience migrate away, who will care if college media exists? As campus budgets shrink, will college media be a priority to receive a subsidy of student fees? With the public perception of journalists in steady decline in recent years, who among the trustees, administrators, student government officers, etc., will shed a tear for the demise of traditional college media? Who will serve as the champion for the survival of college media if it’s defense does not include the strong argument of relevancy?

In increasing numbers students are going to invest their limited time to plan their calendars, learn about events, gossip, network, share their opinions/photos/music/videos, entertain and be entertained, and basically navigate their daily lives at sites like FaceBook, MySpace, UTube, Google, and BigLickU. Where do we in college media fit it? I worry that unless we become as nimble and business-model oriented as these for-profit media companies, any discussion of the academic mission of college media will be, well, academic. Ultimately, I can’t imagine a better educational experience for the next generation of journalists than having a front seat view and role in confronting the business and audience challenges that face college media.

This seems like a natural model for us in the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area, but the immediate (vs long-term) threat seems to be more to the free weeklies and free daily giveaways that the metro dailies are starting. The free weeklies already are competition for us. The idea-killer for us to do this would seem to be having enough staff to compile and update the entertainment listings. In the brave new world, what would be the ethics / legality of creating an online pub like this but linking to other existing pubs for the miles and miles of listings?

re: comments by others about “back in the day” when we all took full class loads, worked for the college paper and worked for the local paper, too. Most students I work with can no longer afford to do all of that. College is too expensive. One of their jobs has to pay the bills. When push comes to shove, we’re what they give up, albeit relictantly.

Great discussion. Keep it going.

Students at student media always have the opportunity to work at the local daily and other media, whether the policy of the editor or the student newspaper allows them to do that at the same time or whether they choose one or the other at one time. That’s exactly what we hope student media is preparing them to do. I encourage them to do so because both student media and professional media experience are valuable for creating future journalists and media producers.

There are student media models that provide the basic learning environment for college journalists whether certain revenue targets are generated or not. In other student media models, the existence of competition is a real economic factor that dictates whether student media will be there at all or not. That environment, usually totally out of the hands of the students involved, will play a big role in determining whether student media can afford to provide its content for free to competitors or not.

I again will acknowledge that I don’t know where all this is going, but we are featuring more blogs, podcasts, Web-original content than ever before at www.idsnews.com. We were recently rated PC-magazine’s most “wired” and “unwired” public university campus in America. Our Web site continues to grow by nearly 100 percent increases in page views and unique visitors over the previous year’s monthly figures. This has happened several years in a row now. However, in or $2.2 million operation, only 3 percent of our revenue is coming from online. I should be happy that we had only about 1 percent of our revenue coming from online operations only a year ago. And, strangely, through better redistribution efforts of our print paper, our daily pickups this year are averaging about 600 more than last year’s figures. I frankly see, at a largely residential campus, that we have the opportunity to continue growth and quality efforts in both print and online. I might point out, from the very beginning of our online site in 1995, we’ve been hiring IUB students to do all our programming. We’ve “partnered” with a couple of national sites to garner more national advertising revenue, and both those partners are no longer in business. However, we’re been fortunate because we’ve always continued to host our site on our own servers.

Most the discussion on this topic and possible challenge deals with the potential threats to the business model for student media newspapers and their online operations. As a life-long journalism educator, this concerns me. The one thing that few keep forgetting to mention is that one of the primary goals and reasons for student media programs is to give mass comm students opportunities for practical experience and growth in the current and future.

Rather by accident, because no student applied to by our newsroom’s “new media director,” we reorganized our spring orientation training in early January. We brought back one of our recent grads (who actually built our softward online “publishing” tool a few years ago). He led our spring semester staff through exercises that helped build confidence in the students. He also electronically “hooked us up” with the folks at the WashingtonPost.com, one of whom is his wife. The prime purpose of our spring staff training: to get all desk editors comfortable with developing and publishing materials unique to the Web on our site. Now, instead of two or three students having “publishing rights,” we have about 35. As January ended yesterday, we’ve revitalized our online efforts and have had more sound photo galleries, video-audio podcasts and, in general, more original online content than ever before. I might also say that the print paper has been exceptional thus far as well.

I always like to say we offer one of the best learning laboratories on our campus, and it cost Indiana University absolutely not one red cent. I hope all of us will continue to learn as much as we can, but keep front and center that we exist as a central part of the education of our student media staffers, as well as to give a true “voice” to students on our campuses. I honestly don’t see BigLickU or other such operations being able to replace those central missions. It is our obligation, as student media leaders, to keep learning, growing and pushing our student journalists into this bold new world of new media, no matter where it might be headed.

I again thank Bryan Murley, Chris Carroll, Ralph Braseth, Eric Jacobs and Rob Pongsajapan (and others) for leading the charge in encouraging all of us to keep our eyes and ears tuned to the current and future changes that propel media in directions of change that are moving us faster than we can “Blink” (great book, by that way!). I am personally thankful that I have been blessed to have a position that doesn’t allow a lot of time to stagnate. To do this in our ever-changing field will likely do harm to our programs and the students were are privileged to serve.