Comments on: ICM Interview: BigLickU’s Chris Winston

By: Chris Winston

Chris Winston — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 12:31:23 +0000

I just wanted to give everybody a quick update: BigLickU.com came out of beta testing earlier this month. While the site is still being improved and worked on daily, I just wanted to extend to you all an invitation to come and check it out. We would love any and all feedback that you might have.

By: lyle

lyle — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 18:15:58 +0000

I think the problems will arise with the advertisers and Honors policy. Have a look at a recently published book by Jeff Chester http://www.democraticmedia.org/jcblog/ from the Center for Digital Democracy http://www.democraticmedia.org/ “Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy” to realise what is at stake in the future if people remain silent about ownership issues in the “new media”.

By: Ralph Braseth

Ralph Braseth — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 00:59:33 +0000

I was getting online to make a CICM post about the oldest newspaper in the world (covering news of the Swedish monarchy) ditching their low circulation print product on January 1 and moving to a digital only format. Luckily I checked the top story and saw the interview with Mr. Winston. This is a “stop the presses” story for college media.

Lots has already been discussed about BLU and I look forward to the comments that will (should) be forthcoming.

What first caught my eye was the planning that went into this. College media doesn’t have the luxury of taking one of our top people and saying, “hey, why don’t you do some brainstorming about niche products and if you get a good one, we’ll give you six months and some resrouces to make it happen.”

And then the patience to wait 18 months for economic metrics to roll in?

We better believe as the last two posts point out that BigLickU is competition and a threat to college media. More than sixty percent of our annual budget comes from advertising and BigLickU wants a bite and probably more.

For those student media centers that are ad-driven like ours is, we need to address this issue head on.

I don’t have students who are capable/interested in spending six months working on developing a sticky site.

Unfortunately, I think I do have students who might jump ship and work for the Memphis Commercial Appeal if it decides to start looking into niche products and audiences. Many of my students work for our center because they want experience that will help them land a good media job and that’s why we exist in large part.

What would look better on a resume, working for The Daily Mississippian or a niche product from The Memphis Commercial Appeal?

And I suspect every once in a while the student produced content from such a niche product might make its way to A-1 on the Memphis flagship product. Wouldn’t that opportunity be attractive to a motivated student journalist?

This is a big moment for college media.

By: Brad Arendt

Brad Arendt — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 18:10:40 +0000

I agree with Kathy. This is indeed direct competition with college media. Advertisers can go to one place and hit seven colleges. Maybe they cut out print and web ads from those college media outlets. At the very least, I would suspect it will effect the amount of money they spend on those traditional college media outlets. Not only do students have X amount of time, advertisers have X amount of dollars.

It would be interesting to see if there is a way to do this in the college media environment - that being tieing many campus’ together as one. No matter, college media can not sit on the sidelines, at least not those who rely on ad dollars.

By: Kathy Lawrence

Kathy Lawrence — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 14:58:35 +0000

I think many college newspapers have policies exactly like the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech. And while Winston says they aren’t competing, they truly are. That’s fine. Just as with the College Newspaper Readership Program, these sites will erode readership of both online and printed products. Students have just X amount of time, and they’ll chose to spend that time at the most compelling sites. We can make our sites just as compelling. However, few in college media have a staff that can devote six months to developing all of these features. Will this be something we can emulate and perhaps expand? I certainly hope so, but all of us had better get moving or we will be playing catchup and perhaps not too successfully.