10000 words on college media
April 29th, 2008 by BryanMegan Taylor points out a series of posts by Mark Luckie at 10000 words focusing on college media web sites.
Here are the three posts:
Online Student Journalism: Best of the Best
Online Student Journalism: Outstanding Use of Multimedia or Social Networking
Online Student Journalism: Best Site Design
I encourage you to go check out the sites Mark highlights, because there’s obviously some good ideas in there (and some of the site designs he highlights are indeed very good).
But I will quibble with the way he ranks the sites. I don’t disagree, for instance, that the Florida Alligator is a really good online journalism site. Or, for that matter, any of the other top 7 school news sites he chose. But I wonder how many sites he’s looked at. I’d also note that he doesn’t mention *any* college TV or radio news sites. That’s a glaring omission.
Unless it’s a contest, I’m very loathe to “rank” schools about which ones are “best” in online news. For one thing, there are 2,000 student media organizations in the U.S. I guarantee I haven’t looked at half of their web sites. Have you, Mark?
For another thing, everyone has shortcomings. Is the site that produces great video better than a site that has high quality podcasts or mashups? Is a site that has a nice mashup better than a site that produces interactive Flash multimedia? Hmm. I don’t know.
The point I think I’m making is that I don’t like ranking with no methodology. We’re supposed to accept the 10000 words‘ edict about the top 7 college media sites because … well, … just because. Show us your work, Mark, or take out the rankings. I’ll happily post 7 sites that I think are doing good things online without ranking them. Here ya go:
Only one of those (InsideVandy) was on Mark’s list, but I’d put them up against any of Mark’s grouping.
Again, I’m not against any of the schools he listed. But I’m also not keen on ranking them. We’ve seen what kind of damage that sort of thinking can do with the BCS. Let’s not start with college news sites.
May 1st, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Hey I caught your post via trackback and wanted to answer your questions. For the series of posts, I reviewed more than 500 active student newspaper websites. Those that showed excellence and promise were narrowed to what still amounted to a long list.
Site design was based on my own individual tastes, but the 7 best overall were determined by ranking factors such as design, integration of print stories, use of multimedia, innovation and more in one big Excel spreadsheet. The top few were evaluated against each other and ranked from there.
I agree there are many organizations that are putting a tremendous effort into the web, but the ones selected are the ones that I recognized as standing out from the crowd. It is certainly not meant to be a definitive list. I appreciate your checking out 10,000 words and hope you enjoy future posts as well.