Editor’s Note: The University Press at Florida Atlantic University has been hard at work this semester reinventing their web/print delivery methods. I asked adviser Michael Koretzky to see if he could get some students to share their experience of the overhaul. Their words follow. I want to share this as an example of how a weekly print publication can use the strengths of the web to complement their print edition. It’s a great idea for more college newspapers to experiment with. And if you’re already doing something similar, by all means, drop me an e-mail and share your experiences at scmurley -at- gmail.com. For the CMS, the front page is a Dreamweaver overlay page, with the guts in College Publisher. Koretzky says: “So the homepage is built and updated in DreamWeaver, while the current issue and daily web stories jump to CP.”
HARD AS HELL, FUN AS HELL
By UP staff
Today marks the 50th day of FAU’s new student media website. If the next 50 days don’t get any easier, we won’t make it past 100.
After perusing every other student media website we could find, we decided to try something that we hadn’t seen: one site that combines the following…
- Daily Web-only stories.
- Daily blogs.
- Daily multimedia, most often video from the student TV station
- Daily radio shows, from our student radio station
And we resolved to use only student content. That meant no wire. No adults.
Well, we figured out why we hadn’t found anyone else doing this. Because it’s really friggin’ hard. For starters, there were huge technical hurdles. We know about writing and editing and design and photography. But writing code eluded us. We had to hunt down students outside of our field to help us, and they weren’t always helpful.
And we had no more money to do this. We had to reallocate our existing budget for the print issue. And we had no more staff. It’s not like we have students beating on our newsroom door looking for low-paying work.
So the first thing we did to launch this new website was…gut our print edition.
We changed our weekly tab from a newspaper to a themed magazine. Each issue was planned at the beginning of the semester to focus on one subject, whether it’s a spring sports preview, SG elections preview, or a Black History Month special.
That last one showed just how multimedia we could get. The cover story was a roundtable discussion featuring students leaders from groups ranging from Black Student Union to College Republicans, debating racial issues of concern to them. The student TV station filmed and aired it, recutting highlights for our website, which we referred to in the print edition. And the student radio station promoted both the show and the story.
That issue turned out so well because our smaller print staff had weeks to plan it out. Meanwhile, the Web staff was charged with covering all breaking news – which it could do much quicker than the 10-day turnaround required in the print edition.
While that made sense to our readers – our Web hits skyrocketed from a few hundred a week to a few hundred a day – some professors and administrators were skeptical at first. Being in the urban environment of South Florida, they’re sophisticated enough to acknowledge and support our Web efforts. But they had reservations about the corresponding changes to the print edition.
When one print edition was nothing more than a man-on-the-street series of Q&As, they expressed concern – and in one case anger – that we’d bled the journalism out of the printed University Press. To their credit, they never mentioned the word censorship or even hinted at doing anything except their concern and disdain. So we had to explain that this was one of our just-for-fun themed issues, and that even during this particular week, we were practicing solid news journalism on the site.
But that’s one of the inherent problems with what we’re doing this semester: The print edition is still a weekly event that can be seen in racks all over campus. Despite the fact that our Web readership (6,000 weekly average) is more than our print run (5,000), the print edition is more ubiquitous.
We quickly discovered that everyone wants the Web edition to be innovative and strong, but they also want the print edition to stay the same. That didn’t seem practical to us – or our readers. Now, our readers can go online daily and read breaking news and themed blogs (Tuesday is SG, Thursday is sports…) and see slideshows and video from campus events. Then they can pick up the print edition to read a comprehensive account of FAU research (an upcoming issue).
This helps not only our readers, but our internal copyflow. With weekly themed issues, we can assign one editor and designer to be in charge weeks in advance. For our annual trek to the New York City Convention, for example, we have an FAU history-in-pictures issue already built.
And when we go to New York, we’ll be running our own convention blog at www.upressonline.com/nyc. Check it out, tell us what you think.
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