ICM Interview: BigLickU’s Chris Winston

(Editor’s Note: Last week, I outlined some news out of Roanoke, Va. that has a direct impact on college student media [BigLickU aims social network at college students; huge implications for college media]. As a follow-up, I conducted this interview with BigLickU.com’s Chris Winston. The interview was conducted on Monday, Feb. 5 via MSN Messenger. Comments were lightly edited for grammar and spellling. Thanks to Chris for taking the time to answer our questions.)

ICM: Okay, so far the only real sense I’ve got about what BLU is has come from some reports and your responses on the weblog. To get us started, why don’t you describe BigLickU in your own words.

Winston: Wow, you start right with the tough ones. You know, I’ve been working on this project full-time for six months now, and I’ve yet to do a good job of this. But I’ll try. BigLickU.com is a hyperlocal social network providing news, information and entertainment to the seven college communities in Southwest Virginia.

It’s a combination of several sites that are already familiar to this audience, including Facebook, CitySearch and craigslist, but the difference is that it’s hyperlocal. We are providing complete directory listings of restaurants, apartment communities, churches and non-profits, business services and entertainment venues for BigLickU.com students to rate and review.

At the same time, they can provide feedback on on-campus dining and residence halls on campus, compete with other students in games and contests, manage their on-campus clubs and organizations, keep up with other area colleges and students, buy and sell items, and read great stories about college life in general. And, of course, keep an online calendar, message board and friends list.

It is set up as a faux university, so BigLickU.com, or Big Lick University, has an Athletics Center, Dining Hall, Residence Hall, Quad, Student Life Center, Study Lounge, Bookstore and Multimedia Center.

ICM: Just for the record, what does the “provost” do?

Winston: We tried to embrace our new college community as much as possible. So, we gave ourselves collegiate-sounding names. As the provost, I am the general manager of the site, overseeing the Dean of Content (Editor), Dean of Advertising and Sales and Dean of Web Development.

ICM: so you’re the “big cheese”.

Winston: If the big cheese suddenly found himself with 50,000 new bosses — the college students, faculty and staff of Southwest Virginia — who were tremendously tech-savvy, despised marketing, changed every four years and were extremely fickle…. Then yes, I am the big cheese. Of course, I report to Dan Wheeler, the director of digital media at the Times-World Corp. in Roanoke.

ICM: You said you have been working on this for six months. Was that when the idea came up? Maybe explain some of the “lightbulb” going off.

Winston: Last March, a committee was formed — isn’t this always the way it works — to explore new Web products that The Roanoke Times might offer. That committee split into two: one focusing on college students and the other focused on the community. The college committee, which called themselves “Animal House”, developed the initial plan to offer a new product to college students.

I developed the university layout and feel over a weekend at home in the summer. We talked to tons of students, those who were working with us at the newspaper already and others on campus, about their needs and desires. We pitched the idea up the ladder at the newspaper and at Landmark Communications, our parent company, in June and July. In early August, we received the go-ahead.

The name, Big Lick University, actually came from a group at the Poynter Institute that two Roanoke Times employees — John Jackson and Mark Morrison — were attending. .

ICM: So we can blame Poynter for the name? It sounds a little uncomfortable.

Winston: We wanted to find a name that embodied our strong regional focus, our all-important target demographic, and was memorable. With Roanoke serving as the epicenter of our effort, Roanoke’s original name prior to 125 years ago, Big Lick made a lot of sense. Combine that with University, or U, and we think we found all three of our goals.

ICM: What about the software that runs the site. Is that being built in-house?

Winston: Yes, it is, in fact. We looked at several other applications that have been developed elsewhere, such as the successful Lawrence.com site. However, to make it as distinctive and unusual as possible, we are developing it. With the oversight of IT guru Richard Charles at the Roanoke office, it has come a tremendously long way in 6 months.

ICM: I believe I read that the site goes live this week. In anticipation of the roll-out, how have you been reaching out to college students on these campuses?

Winston: We have launched the initial phase of the site, which includes a tremendous amount of testing and content seeding for the site. We will probably not roll out completely live until later in February. To share information about our site, we have relied a lot on our students — there are more than 30 working with us — to pass out merchandise and help get people enrolled for early admission.

We have also been working with student clubs and organizations. We are sponsoring a Midnight Movie series with the Student Film Organization at Tech and the Lyric Theatre in Blacksburg. We are sponsoring the Society of Professional Journalists chapter at Tech’s career fair in March. And we are helping sponsor the Women’s Studies Club at Radford University’s Wellness Fair in March.

With all of these groups, we believe we can help them promote the good work they are doing, while also spread the word of BigLickU.com at the same time. They call that a win-win, I believe, but I wish there was another word for it. .

ICM: I believe the NAA story said that the content was going to be 90% student produced. How do you plan to accomplish that.

Winston: All of the stories being written for the site are by the 20 to 25 students who are working for us. Our goal is to have three or four new pieces of content every day. The other content for the site comes in the form of ratings and reviews, user-submitted stories and photos and information about clubs, organizations, bands and sports teams. We are not “pushing out” any information from The Roanoke Times on the site. If there is a story by the newspaper, or another media outlet, that is extremely compelling to our audience, then we will link to it. But this is not a newspaper site. This is a whole different animal. That answers one question.

The other question, “how” we will get students to participate is more difficult to answer. As a university, we do give our credits for taking part in our site, so you do grow from freshman to senior to graduate status by commenting, rating, reviewing, adding friends, inviting others, etc. to our site. Hopefully, the competition (and the prizes we will give along with that) will encourage students to participate. But from what we found, all students remember what it was like to be a freshman and unacclimated. We think they will help classmates..

ICM: You mentioned that you have 30 students working for you. Are these working on the site, freelancing, or what? 20 to 25, sorry.

Winston: We have three students selling advertising. We have two students who will be designing the ads. We have more than 20 students who are contributing content, either as freelance submissions or paid or unpaid internships. When we move development of the site to Blacksburg — it is still in Roanoke at the moment — we also plan to have students working on the design and programming of the site.

ICM: What has the response been like so far from the advertising community?

Winston: Honestly? Wait-and-see for the most part. We met with several advertisers in late 2006, but we didn’t have anything to show them until very recently. Of course, no one wanted to commit until they see the site. We just got our student sales representatives hired and trained, and they are heading out this week for pre-selling. But advertisers are always interested in reaching new customers.

And we believe that is exactly what we are able to offer them. Obviously, exposure from Advertising Age will help us spread the word. And we expect to see some more positive attention for our site in the coming weeks that will help advertisers identify us and what we are up to.

But honestly, we don’t know how quickly we will be able to build traffic, so it’s difficult to both price and promise exposure to advertisers until we actually see some traffic figures.

That first call is always fun. Big Lick? Luckily for us, people here trust The Roanoke Times as a powerful advertising medium, and see the exposure that roanoke.com has received nationally. Also luckily for us, many advertisers know exactly where Big Lick comes from. So I don’t think that is going to be a hurdle. The next thing you have to do is show them our Honor Code which shows advertisers, and users, that we are committed to keeping illegal activity, pornography, libel and the like off of our site. If a user, which has to be registered with a .edu email address, is found to violate our Honor Code, they can face warnings, suspensions or expulsion from BigLickU.com. We believe that will help advertisers and users understand our point of view.

ICM: Has there been any concern expressed from your superiors about the “edginess” of a site like this.

Winston: To their credit, the leadership at The Roanoke Times and Landmark Communications understand that it’s got to be fun and edgy to really capture this demographic. That is why we set up offices in Blacksburg. That is why we have different advertising mediums and rules. They wanted a way to guard against pornography and horrible language and name-calling. Which is where the Honor Code comes in.

ICM: Now, I’d like to ask about some of the concerns that were raised in our previous coverage: What do you say to someone who sees this as a threat to college media?

Winston: I understand the concern. But this is not a product attacking student media. We are not attempting to cover news on campus. We are trying to give students at seven colleges and universities news and information that affects ALL of them. And we are trying to give advertisers in Southwest Virginia a chance to reach ALL of these students in the collective.

We are giving college students information they cannot find anywhere else. And we are giving college students a chance to showcase their hard work to the people who live in their communities, the students at the surrounding universities and the population at large. These are not things that college media has been trying to do. There is room there for us to offer a different product, we believe.

And as I’ve said before, some student media groups seem interested in using our site to help promote their work. And we hope all of them will do so. We believe it can be beneficial to both sides.

ICM: What about if students decide that they will work for BLU and forego experience on campus media altogether? Does that seem like a possibility?

Winston: I certainly hope not. We have writers from student media at Hollins, Roanoke and Radford working with us. And we aren’t asking for so much work to take them away. Sadly, that is the situation at Virginia Tech, because the campus newspaper does not allow students to work for us and for them. We are lucky enough to have one radio person at Tech working with us, however. (See Editor’s note at bottom for more info.)

ICM: What are the long-term plans for the site? What’s the timetable for judging it a success?

Winston: We have very ambitious goals for the site, including traffic, users, registered users and revenue. My guess is that we will take the next 12-18 months to evaluate those metrics, and then decide what is next. It may be a “beautiful failure” as outgoing Times Editor Mike Riley has suggested. But there’s only one way to find out.

ICM: And what are the longer range goals? Are there plans for a nation of BigLicks?

Winston: We are spending all of our time worrying about a small Big Lick success, so it’s a little early to discuss huge roll-out plans. However, I don’t believe it would be one national site. The strength to this site is its local content, and we will not be doing anything to hurt that.

ICM: I suppose I meant other papers doing the same kind of thing on their campuses? Are you folks at the front of a wave on this?

Winston: When you look at what Bakersfield is doing with Bakotopia, the Journal-World is doing with Lawrence and the Star Tribune is doing with Vita.mn, I think you see a national trend of papers trying to find additional niche possibilities. I’m not sure any of them are roll-away successes. But my guess is you will see a lot more media companies trying new things. Hopefully, we will be something to emulate.

ICM: Anything else you’d like to add for our audience?

Winston: I appreciate the opportunity to share more about what we are doing. I thoroughly enjoyed the discussion with you and with the other contributors to the blog. I hope campus media becomes a leader in innovation and delivers a new generation of tech-savvy journalists to companies and products such as mine — because we desperately need them.

________________________

Editor’s Note: I contacted Va. Tech adviser Kelly Wolff, who confirmed Winston’s statement:

The editors of the Collegiate Times have a policy that staffers cannot work for a competing publication while working for the Collegiate Times. Their reasoning is that the conflicts of interest, dual loyalties and roles can produce create ethical problems. For example, if a reporter becomes aware of a breaking news story or a photographer shoots an important spot news shot, how would they decide which publication gets to publish it?

Many members of the Collegiate Times (and Student Publications Photo staff) have worked for competing organizations, just not at the same time.

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