August 31, 2010 in College Media, design, Redesigns, Websites
The Daily Bruin just launched a new version of their site now using the Gryphon CMS from DetroitSoftworks.
Here’s the new design:
Here’s a screencap from Aug. 31, right before the switch:
And here’s an ancient screen cap from 2007 (file image):
August 31, 2010 in Conferences, Legal Issues
Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Center for Sustainable Journalism are hosting a one-day Media Law in the Digital Age workshop at Kennesaw State on Saturday, September 25
Len Witt, who heads the CSJ, mentions that there are a few student scholarships available to reduce costs to $14.99 instead of the full $69.
The digital age has provided a host of challenges to traditional legal concepts of privacy, libel, copyright, etc. This looks to be a good overview of the subject.
August 30, 2010 in College Media, design, Redesigns, Websites
Jim Killam sends along word about the redesign of the Northern Star at Northern Illinois.
Here’s the new look:
And here’s what the site looked like a couple of years ago (most recent version I have):
In addition to the redesign, the Northern Star is now using TownNews as a CMS. Previously, they had a homegrown CMS solution.
August 30, 2010 in Conferences
Students and advisers can now register online for the fall National College Media Convention Oct. 27-31 in Louisville. Which means you can also register for the Main Street Stories multimedia workshop we’re putting on during the course of the weekend. Details on the workshop are available here. For more details about the convention, download the registration booklet (PDF)
August 26, 2010 in College Media, design, Redesigns, Websites
Onward State is an online-only publication for Penn State. Publisher Davis Shaver sends along news of their redesign for the new school year. “Major new features include community posting capabilities, community member profiles, and topic pages,” Shaver wrote in an e-mail.
Here’s the old design:
And here’s the new design:
More news above the fold, more graphics, and a lighter color scheme, along with the features mentioned above.
August 25, 2010 in College Media, Redesigns, Websites
The Lee Clarion of Lee University redesigned over the summer. Kevin Trowbridge said it was redesigned for the first time since the site went online in 2008.
Here’s the old design:
Here’s the new design:
Lighter flag, larger dominant art, more white space overall.
August 24, 2010 in College Media, design, Redesigns, Websites
New school year, new site designs. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be sharing screenshots of some of the online college news sites that have put on a new coat of digital pixie dust. If your media outlet has redesigned the web presence over the summer, drop me an e-mail at scmurley -at- gmail.com to be included in the coverage.
First up in the box, the Boise State Arbiter. The Arbiter last redesigned when they moved off the College Publisher CMS in 2009. Here’s the earlier redesign:
And here’s the new redesign:
The new design looks clean. Fewer rounded corners, a little less blue, and I like that they’ve pushed more news to the top of the page with the addition of the middle rail of stories, while also focusing more attention on the main photo carousel as well.
What do you think? Feel free to comment below.
August 19, 2010 in Conferences, Links
Do you have *your* parking pass yet? Start of a new semester. Here are some links from around the Web to stuff I’ve been reading. In no particular order, and with some non-journospecific goodness.
Choose Your Multimedia Tools Strategically: Story is Still King, Marc Cooper: “New multimedia tools, now reproducing themselves exponentially, provide reporters and editors with sometimes awe-inspiring ways to tell our stories. Learning to master these tools and when to choose them, however, can be as important as which tool a surgeon requests for a certain procedure in the compressed atmosphere of an OR.
Selecting the wrong application for your need, or innovating for the sake of innovation itself, can be as big a mistake as ignoring these tools to better tell your story.” Yep.
Journalism Warning Labels, Tom Scott: Humorous, but true. (via Doug Fisher).
A fresh look at reporting skills, Mindy McAdams: asking the question: what skills should a reporter know?
Matt Thompson at the Argo Project: A quality series of posts like “A blogger’s morning ritual: 5 points to keep in mind,” and “A quick tip on hyperlinks.” Peruse the whole series.
Master the Art of Low-Effort Cooking, lifehacker: Who knew a rice cooker could be so useful? Apparently, Roger Ebert.
Catharsis, David McRaney: Apparently, blowing up and venting your frustrations will not help you relieve stress, but actually makes behavior worse over time. Perhaps something to keep in mind in the newsroom. (via Lifehacker).
The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet, Chris Anderson: Wired’s editor and Michael Wolff troll for page views on a Web site and in a dead-tree magazine. Oh, irony.
60 ways to increase your influence online, Sam Rosen: Advice from some pretty well-known online types.
August 19, 2010 in College Media, Websites
This summer, I had the opportunity to travel back to my hometown, Beaumont, Texas, and visit my college newspaper stomping grounds – the University Press.
Student Publications Director Andy Coughlan led me through the offices, which have been expanded greatly since my time working until all hours of the night to get out a twice-weekly paper. The equipment is obviously different. There’s no typesetter, no UPI dot-matrix printer, no photo darkroom, no Compugraphic computers with 5-inch floppy disk drives.
The home page of the University Press
It was a surprise, then, to find out that the University Press is going to begin posting online content this fall for the first time. Previously, they’ve posted PDF versions of their print publication. Now, they’ll be using College Publisher to begin posting online.
Part of the impetus for the effort is the fact that Lamar will have a football team this fall for the first time in 20 years (I was in college when the school killed its football program. We editorialized in favor of the move).
I can’t begin to express how weird it felt to be a person who’s all about moving news online and the student newspaper I worked on is only now moving into the 21st century.
I spent a few minutes with Coughlan discussing the ins-and-outs of publishing content first online. I’ll repeat a few of the things we talked about, because they seem to crop up often in my travels and in e-mail conversations with journalists:
First, break news online. This is important. No, it’s essential. If you publish once or twice a week and you’re not “publishing” the score from Saturday’s football game until Wednesday, you’re not doing anyone any favors. Fans already know the score and most of the details of the game, so you’re printing old news, which, as you may have guessed, is an oxymoron. As soon as you can, put up the score and some of the essential details of the game. It’s a practice that will serve you well when you get into the “real” world. Then work on a forward-looking story for the print edition.
Second, the online audience is not the print audience. Although there are more students getting information via the Internet, they’re not necessarily using that medium for school news. The bulk of traffic is still coming from faculty, administrators, parents, alumni and prospective students. That means a couple of things: 1) you’re not cannibalizing your print audience by putting things on the web first, and 2) your advertising strategy is going to have to be different, because your audience is different.
Finally, embrace the tools of the web to tell stories online. I repeat this so often it’s become a cliche, but if you’re an editor or a copy editor and a reporter turns in a story without at least three hyperlinks to related content, they are not finished with the story! The hyperlink is the most basic building block of Web content. Get that right, at least.
August 18, 2010 in College Media News, Content Management Systems
The Chronicle of Higher Education had an article recently about college newspapers abandoning “template-driven” College Media Network for open-source content management systems (CMS): For College Newspapers, Prepackaged Online Versions are Yesterday’s News.
The article quotes the editor of the Daily Texan about how they now have so much more control over the presentation of the material on their web site:
The site made its debut this past spring semester. The editors can now position stories and headlines where they want them, depending on the flow of the news, and showcase different kinds of media. They couldn’t do that before.
Ms. Winchester said the freedom is invaluable. “Students are working on our Web site, and students are deciding how the Web site will look,” she said.
However, I have to make the point that I have been making for several years: It’s not the CMS. It’s the journalism. A CMS is a tool, just like a hammer, or fire, or whatever other analogy you’d like to throw in there. It doesn’t necessarily help or hinder your ability to tell stories. As Madison McCord, a student, wrote for us a while back, even a hand-coded html site can produce good content and design.
But what use is a shiny new CMS if you’re still producing stale, shovelware-esque content?
For instance, the day the Chronicle story came out, the Daily Texan has a story about downtown parking, and yet there is no link to the City of Austin Transportation Department web page, which I found in a 2-second search of teh Google.
Or, take this breezy summer story about desserts with alcohol in them. The story mentions two specific local establishments that serve these cold refreshments, and yet doesn’t provide a link to the web page of either 219 West or Dolce Vita’s Facebook page, both of which – again – I found via teh Google.
In short, it’s Shovelware (you can read the same story in the PDF of the issue here).
And then there is the issue of site design. When vast numbers of site visitors enter your site through individual story pages (via Google searches or through social network links via Twitter or Facebook), that shiny front page positioning thing misses them completely.
I’m mainly writing this to reinforce something I said in 2007: It’s not the CMS – it’s the journalism. Period.
Web-first means thinking about alternate ways to tell stories. To think about video, to think about audio, to think about maps, to think about alternate ways to illustrate information to grab people’s attention. It means to think about how to create a community around your web site. To eschew traditional journalistic “journalism as lecture” mindset and think about “news as conversation”.
If nothing else, get your students to check out this checklist of things they could be doing online (for free!). If they aren’t doing those things, what difference is a different content management system going to make?
I’m sure there will be more migration to open-source CMS’s in the next year, and new hosting options. But let’s keep the main thing the main thing.
