Last weekend in Chicago, I sat in on a discussion with Jim Killam from NIU about the future of college newspapers. We talked about “The Bubble,” which is the high readership rates of college print publications (over 70 percent) as compared with most newspapers. “The Bubble” has enabled print publications to avoid some of the economic challenges facing big newspapers.
During the discussion, I made this point (which I’ve made in several previous talks): Part of the reason students read the newspaper is because it’s readily available when they have time to kill before class or during class. But once hardware like the iPhone or iPod Touch or similar things that allow people to access the real Internet wirelessly are widely available on campus, readership of the print edition could decline, along with advertising.
That’s a theory, mind you. It hasn’t been tested because gadgets like the iPhone/iPod Touch haven’t been “seeded” widely enough on college campuses to see if such a change in readership habits occurs.
Now, Abilene Christian University will be the first university to put that theory to the test.
An Apple iPhone or iPod touch will become a central part of Abilene Christian University’s innovative learning experience this fall when all freshmen are provided one of these converged media devices, said Phil Schubert, ACU executive vice president.
It’s not clear from the press release whether every incoming class of students will get one of these things, but it’s possible. Several schools now require students to have laptops when they come to school.
But as the students become more familiar with the iPhone/iPod Touch, there’s a greater likelihood they’ll surf the web - either to news sites or social network sites like Facebook - before and during class instead of picking up the campus newspaper.
The Optimist, the student newspaper at ACU, has a web presence and is using YouTube for video distribution. They have a good faculty member in Cade White, who’s been studying the changes in photojournalism for some time. See previous coverage here.
This will be an interesting experiment to watch. It might also be a harbinger of things to come for college newspapers, a potential disruption that bursts the “Bubble.”
on Feb 28th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
here’s hoping they have a wireless access platform of some sort, or a way of rendering the page prettily in mobile browsers.
on Feb 28th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
For the iPhone and iPod Touch, the browsing method is a regular Safari web browser. It doesn’t use the mobile web.
on Feb 29th, 2008 at 8:09 am
This initiative at ACU is working in conjunction with a multimillion dollar “Converged Media Newsroom” that went online this year and that brings together print, photography, video and audio, breaking down traditional barriers between these forms by housing them in one shared facility and providing them with new publication channels–such as the iPhone. See for more information
Thanks for an interesting article…
on Feb 29th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Bryan, thanks for the write-up. Despite all the negative rumblings we all about the future of journalism, I think the future has never been brighter for those willing to break from the business-as-usual crowd.
Several months ago I became part of a campus-wide R&D effort to dream up new ways to use the iPhone as a learning/communication tool in the educational environment. My role in all this is to specifically look to the iPhone as the end consumption point for student media content, which is of course, easier said than done. I’ll be blogging about some of this at http://digicade.blogspot.com in the very near future. Thanks.
Cade
on Mar 11th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
We’ve created an optimized version of our university homepage, and many of our news feeds, for the iPhone (http://www.vanderbilt.edu/iphone). RSS makes this so easy and I think will be a good way for student papers to quickly move to making their content more accessible on the iPhone.