Innovation in College Media

Participants in this week's CollegeJourn chat covered a lot of ground. The following are just a few highlights. Read the full chat log here.

How can journalism students promote collaboration with other campuses, if at all?

This question focuses on the sharing of content and data among colleges locally and nationwide. For example, if textbook prices are outrageous at your school, should you be able to go to a database maintained by other college newspapers and see what kinds of stats they have on textbook prices?

The New York Times and ProPublica are looking into doing something similar through DocumentCloud, which would be a place for reporters to store documents they gather during reporting for other newsrooms to use.

A few opinions offered on taking the concept to a college level:

The coordination should be on back-end stuff, like what CoPress is working on .
-@polarscribe

College titles that exist in the same or nearby regions won't collaborate. It's against the culture of college publications.
-@BenLaMothe

Our college paper has very limited budgets for any kind of travel to - the idea of :"sharing" resources especially for sports reporting sounds promising
-@tulsatrends

@CICM Canadian College Press Association is a good basis for something beyond the shared stories/learning
-@gmarkham

I have a feeling that if I pitched that concept to my news editor or editor in chief, they'd both say 'that's what we pay for an AP wire subscription for'
-@mbardon

This discussion led to the topic of AP wire services: Should student publications even use them? The consensus seemed to lie in either of the two options:

I think the AP wire has made college journos lazy
-@BenLaMothe

The only possible reason to run wire is if you're a daily and need to fill. I'd rather run fewer pages than have to fill, but, eh.
-@polarscribe

What are the biggest mistakes college journalists make?

One big mistake young reporters tend to make from my observations is allowing themselves to be used by sources
-@danieldoyle

asking third level questions would be helpful. too often questions only go to second level.
-@cicm

A lot of people forget that the easiest stories are followups.
-@polarscribe

4-5 prepared questions, ready to divert on follow-ups as long as possible. If you don't get all 4-5 asked, it probably was a terrific interview because you had so many follow-ups.
-JohnLowe

 Join the chatroom next Sunday at www.collegejourn.com, 8-11EST to discuss industry-specific topics with students, educators and professionals.