14 thoughts on “BigLickU aims social network at college students; huge implications for college media”

1. Chris Winston says:

   January 31, 2007 at 5:46 am

   Bryan, you bring up some great points about what newspapers are trying to do to reach new audiences, especially younger audiences. Times-World, through Timescast and other offerings, has attempted to do that for awhile. BigLickU is just another example of that. Thanks for discussing this topic, and the potential implications on college media, in such a thoughtful way.

   I will take one quick moment to challenge one essential element to your entry: We do not see ourselves as a direct competitor with campus media. Students will continue to pick up and read their campus papers to find out news and information that is affecting their campus and town.

   Since we are attempting to cover an area that includes seven such schools, we will be focusing on the topics that unite these students — shared experiences, if you will. Our stories will center around universal themes of college life, whether you are a Hokie at Virginia Tech or a student at Virginia Western Community College. Our emphasis will be in the macro, and shouldn't affect campus newspaper staffs' ability to connect their audiences with news and information.

   In fact, some student media groups are exploring ways to work with us. Our content management system is open, so anyone can post a story. Some local student media groups are considering using our site to gain a wider audience, by posting their stories and pointing out that they originally appeared somewhere else, with a link.

   Regardless, your point about boosting online campus news sites is very important, and they are skills that every budding journalist (be they print, radio or television) should be acquiring. We're not sure where this is headed, but we have a sneaking suspicion it has something to do with the "tubes" that make up the Internet.

   Chris Winston

   Provost

   BigLickU.com
2. ralph braseth says:

   January 31, 2007 at 7:47 am

   My greatest fear is that college media will assume a defensive posture when dealing with the sweeping changes that continue to come in waves (perfect example with BigLickU). My first reaction was to smack myself for not thinking of it first. I have an e-mail sitting in my box from the editor of the Tupelo newspaper. A small daily by most standards, but one that has always tried to serve Oxford, Miss. as part of its audience. He wants to get together to explore ways we might work together. Scary? Opportunities? Strange? Yup, all that and more. I'm not sure we will be able to work together, but I surely won't miss the opportunity to talk. Ironically, he's a former editor of The Daily Mississippian. And look at Mr. Winston's title above: Provost. They've put some thought into this.
3. Kelly Wolff says:

   January 31, 2007 at 10:05 am

   Bryan, thanks as always for timely and insightful work on new media trends in the college environment.

   I'm very interested in hearing more from Chris about the collaboration opportunities he sees for student media groups with his site. I haven't talked with Chris yet, but another Roanoke Times representative did request a meeting with the editor of the Collegiate Times last semester. The CT editor went in to talk about collaboration, but came out disappointed that while the Roanoke Times seemed to want free content from the Collegiate Times, it wasn't willing to open up a discussion about any kind of compensation from advertising revenues for it.

   Collaboration between professional media and student media is a great concept if it is to be a two way street. Professional media outlets rightly grumble about their stories being harvested to supply free content for advertiser supported aggregator sites. Links and attributions don't pay the bills for salaries, computers, or DSL lines.
4. Eric Jacobs says:

   January 31, 2007 at 12:46 pm

   I just returned from the Newspaper Association of America Marketing Conference in Las Vegas, where the folks from Roanoke showed off BickLickU at a session on what commercial newspapers are doing in the area of social networking. I had three immediate reacitons to the BigLickU presentation:

   (1) It seemed brilliant. I don't know if the user experience in real-life will match the way it was all laid out in the presentation, but yes, they have clearly put a LOT of thought into this.

   (2) If I was one of the college papers on the campuses covered by BigLickU, I'd be worried. At this moment in time, community involvement in newspaper web sites seems to be the most common consensus about our future. If college students gradually shift readership from print to online, college newspapers whose web sites mostly mirror their print edition are surely going to lose reader share to more "fun", interactive, relevant-to-them sites like BigLickU. I would disagree with Chris Winston's comment that they aren't competing with college media. Sure they are. First, for eyeballs, time and mindshare. And then for ad dollars. I'm not slamming them; I'm giving them props — but this should send a chill down the spine of any college paper in this market (and others which will follow, especially if BigLickU is successful).

   (3) I kicked myself why college newspapers haven't headed in this direction already, and wondered whether we can still get there in time. I'm going to be talking with College Publisher tomorrow about whether they see this type of system as part of the future, and whether they'd be willing to develop some of the pieces of technology for the newspapers which are part of their network.

   Overall, there was a pretty upbeat tone to the NAA Marketing Conference. Newspapers, tired of being told they're losing readers and headed towards oblivion, are fighting back with a lot of online efforts. Newspaper companies are practically falling over themselves in the in transition to becoming "platform-agnostic" information sources. And they're racing forward with lots of new sites and ventures, many of which not directly connected to the flagship newspaper brand. "For newspapers, the monolithic business model is dead," said one speaker; a business that runs a portfolio of products is the new focus.

   In fact, the tag-line of the newspaper industry's 2007 marketing message is "Newspaper. The Multi-Medium". (That new campaign looks to be a powerful offensive directly confronting the concerns people voice about newspapers. Among the upcoming ad headlines: "The Internet is the best thing to happen to newspapers since the paperboy", with copy going on to explain that readership of newspaper online sites by 18-24 year-olds is growing, not shrinking; "Is Newspaper New Media or Old Media? Yes." and "You'll never get 140 million Americans to agree on anything about the news. Except where to get it.")
5. Chris Winston says:

   January 31, 2007 at 2:58 pm

   Fascinating discussion. I certainly need to visit this site more often.

   I know Kelly said she would like to "hear more" from me, but I am probably going to give her more than she bargained for.

   In short form, I would like to point out the ways that I think campus media and local news organizations can work together for the benefit of both. Though I'm not sure any of these will "pay the bills" for either side, it can be mutually beneficial in a number of ways.

   Among them:

   1. If campus media organizations allowed their stories and photos to be reprinted in local media (with attribution, of course — not an uncommon practice in the industry), then a different audience, including the surrounding community, would be exposed to the fine work of student staff members. This can lead to many additional opportunities for students, including future job prospects with that organization or someone else.

   2. Collaboration between the two groups allows for the students to also be exposed to many additional training opportunities. We welcome the chance to speak to classes and student organizations about the industry and its trends (I spoke last week to SPJ at Tech, and I will speak tomorrow to a media class, for instance.) We can offer students not only lectures, but also job shadowing, connection to internship opportunities, hands-on editing, idea generation and critiques. All for free. This can be especially important for universities without journalism-specific degrees. We believe these things contribute to improved campus media.

   3. Additional job opportunities for students: When I was in college (Go Cocks!) I was able to go to class, work for the campus paper and work for the local daily at the same time. We would love to have more students working for both campus media and us. And we do. In fact, the Editor-in-Chief of The (Radford University) Tartan covers technology for us. Sadly, some campus media organizations do not allow their students to gain valuable experience with local media at the same time (whether it's us, local weeklies, television stations, radio stations, etc.)

   No, the two groups will probably not be sharing revenue anytime soon. We are, however, compensating the students who work for us through pay and academic credit. And we believe we are working to build a better generation of journalists in the meantime. And in the end, isn't that a great goal for all of us?
6. Bryan says:

   January 31, 2007 at 3:20 pm

   I want to thank all of you for these comments. These types of discussions are fruitful and will hopefully benefit everyone in the long run.
7. David Adams says:

   February 1, 2007 at 3:53 am

   Wow! I skimmed through this yesterday. Have spent considerable time reading this discussion and thinking more deeply about it today. We seem to be one of those organizations that Bryan indicates might be at the most risk for such things as BigLickU sites. We're fully supported by our own advertising revenue. We certainly have a student population in excess of 20,000 (actually, in Bloomington alone, we have 38,000 at IU-Bloomington and another 4,000 at Ivy Tech Community College). And we're only 50 miles south of Indianapolis, whose daily paper is a Gannett product.

   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 http://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.
8. Kelly Wolff says:

   February 1, 2007 at 4:12 am

   Chris's additional comments are a most welcome part of the discussion.

   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.
9. Lloyd Goodman says:

   February 1, 2007 at 6:04 am

   Frequent reader, first-time discusser ….

   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.
10. chris carroll says:

    February 1, 2007 at 10:36 am

    I’m struck by a couple of themes expressed in the comments, above. First, Eric Jacobs who I very much respect rightly points out that “At this moment in time, community involvement in newspaper web sites seems to be the most common consensus about our future. If college students gradually shift readership from print to online, college newspapers whose web sites mostly mirror their print edition are surely going to lose reader share to more “fun”, interactive, relevant-to-them sites like BigLickU. . . .I kicked myself why college newspapers haven’t headed in this direction already, and wondered whether we can still get there in time.”

    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.
11. Roland Lazenby says:

    February 7, 2007 at 7:07 pm

    We are planetblacksburg.com, an alternative, online college media organization in Blacksburg. My student editors met with Chris Winston tonight and discussed sharing stories with BigLickU.

    Our concern: What happens if college media partner with this business venture, and because of that partnership, the college media begin to lose identity and integrity? These ventures will no doubt be popular with relatively desperate newspaper companies. What if the ventures fail and the newspapers abandon them? Will college media be weakened and destroyed in the process?

    Unfortunately, no static position is acceptable in this game we play. You move forward or die. The future is a murky reality; the past is, well, history. I teach journalism at Virginia Tech. I tell my students they inhabit the postmodern age, defined many ways but characterized mostly by relentless and unforgiving change. It is their job to learn to inhabit such an environment. What better way to teach them than college media?
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