Mindy McAdams posts some good thoughts on her blog (now with WordPress goodness!) - Thinking about learning Flash:

I’m suggesting that you set yourself up to succeed, not fail. And that means maybe you shouldn’t plan to finish that project on deadline, and then rush and gnash your teeth and feel stupid — and quit. If you’re a photographer — was your first roll of film worthy of Page One? If you’re a designer — was your first information graphic suitable for a section front? And if you’re a reporter — surely your first story was completely rewritten by your editor?

Why should learning Flash be any different from other storytelling practices?

She has a good point. Flash is a different animal than print journalists are used to dealing with. Timelines, actionscripts, and a confusing interface all call for a different mindset than Word or even InDesign or Quark Xpress. So there will be a natural learning curve.

This semester, I’m using Mindy’s Flash Journalism for an interactive media class for the first time. I’m glad students will have time to explore the strengths and weaknesses of Flash over the course of a semester before coming up with a final product. If you’re hoping to use more Flash in your college media operation this year, I’d suggest a similar stress on training before attempting to put out something for the general public. Let students learn to succeed, then use that training to come up with innovative storytelling.

E-media tidbits follows up on the impact of Facebook with college media. Take a look. We’ve written about this before here. For all our Facebook coverage, click here.

A couple of weeks ago, Howard Owens posted a list (!) of eight historic mistakes the newspaper industry made. It’s a good list, not just because it highlights some of the missteps the news industry has made, but also how prevalent some of these mistakes are, even now. Before you continue reading, I’d suggest you head on over to Howard’s blog and read his comments and suggestions.

I’m going to point out some college media-specific questions you should be asking about these mistakes. Mainly, are you *still* guilty of making them, even today? If so, why? And, more importantly, how can you get past these things.

• Newspapers were slow to embrace blogging.
  I’ve been following weblogs since 2001, and have co-written two academic papers and written a chapter for a forthcoming book about weblogging. That doesn’t make me an expert, but it does mean that I’ve heard most every complaint journalists have made about weblogs. Despite those complaints, weblogs have proven resilient and popular. Howard is right that the failure of newspapers to embrace the weblogging format has been a significant shortcoming, fostering an “us vs. them” mentality - journalists vs. the unwashed masses. Instead of fighting the platform, find ways to involve your student media into “blog-like” activities on the web site.
• Failure to protect vertical categories, especially auto and real estate, by building robust, content-centric, user-centric vertical sites.
  For college media, this translates to vertical categories that are important to students - entertainment, college sports, and apartment and dining guides. If you don’t do it online, someone else will. I know we don’t all have the vast resources of major media conglomerates, but we do have the advantage of knowing our audiences (I hope!). Use that advantage to develop your offerings in “verticals” (gad, I hate that word!).
• The failure to invest in search.
  The issue here isn’t so much a problem with news sites that are on College Publisher, but more for sites that have their own content management systems. Search is important for your site, as it brings in readers who ordinarily wouldn’t find your content. If you think your search is adequate, try this experiment: Take a topic that was controversial on your campus two or three years ago and enter a search term in Google (i.e., “tuition increase at Vanderbilt University”) and see where your media outlet shows up in the search results.
• It was a mistake to view content as something we do and audiences read, take it or leave it.
  If you think your online audience is passive, you’ve missed the boat. College media needs to figure out ways to involve the audience in the online news site, to develop “sticky” features, and also respond to the audience when legitimate questions arise about coverage. See also: shovelware.
• The newspaper web operations that did discover how to get five percent or more of newspaper revenue from up sells and forced buys should have been reinvesting that money in online operations, instead of trying to juice the bottom line.
  For college media, the key takeaway from this is that you should be selling more online, even devoting ad staff to online only sales days or something. Upsells (adding web onto print buys) are fine for many, but if we don’t figure out how to turn up more pure web ad dollars, we’re missing a part of the puzzle. And when you get those ad dollars, use them to invest in multimedia equipment or training for your staff, don’t just throw it into the general operating budget.
• Newspapers did not want to believe that the web was pull rather than push, so simply dumping each days edition of the newspaper online seemed like a good idea.
  “Shovelware” as it’s called is still a major part of online operations on student media web sites. That’s changing, but it’s a slow process. Creating a rich experience for your online news site means more than taking the stories from the day’s paper and putting it into a CMS. You’ve heard it here before, but I’ll say it again: the web editor should be on par with the print managing editor in your organizational structure. Editors should expect and demand “extras” on major stories - extras that will be available online only (links, documents, audio, video, slideshows, etc.).
• Newspaper sites have long suffered from a lack of utility.
  I’ve seen numerous sites that are difficult to navigate, where content goes to die. If your student web site hasn’t had any usability testing done, that’s a good place to start. Get some random students, professors and staff to spend some time surfing through your site. Observe their interactions and ask them what works, what’s confusing, and what makes no sense at all. This is a simple version of usability testing, but it will reveal a lot about how you might be frustrating your audience. You wouldn’t do this with your printed edition, why do it online?

Any other mistakes you see? Drop them in the comments.

Catching up on some video from the New York CMA convention in March, we’re posting this interview with Paul Conley, a b2b consultant and an early Internet pioneer (and one of the most quotable people in journalism - ed.). He talks about the skill set journalists will need in the future. See if you can identify the names he mentions as “must knows.” (note: please turn up the volume, as our audio is kind of low, and Paul has a soft speaking voice - ed.)

A week ago, I e-mailed the College Media Advisers listserv asking if any student media outlets are using social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace to promote their web presence. At a conference in Washington, D.C. last year, one adviser mentioned that they were using Facebook, and I couldn’t remember who it was who mentioned it (my apologies again for the memory lapse).

Why use social networks? Good question. Answer: Your readers are already there, and they tend to get their news from social networks, rather than traditional media. I’ve seen it myself in classes, when students log on to their Facebook or MySpace profiles in breaks, or before class begins. Now, there’s data to back up the idea that the target demographic for college media is on social networks. (Disclaimer: I have both a Facebook profile and a MySpace profile, along with about 20 other social media profiles)

Rebecca McKinnon mentions a few reasons to join Facebook for established journalists. And Mark Glaser (as usual) has an excellent rundown of the social networking phenomenon. Also, if you’re in the sociological frame of mind, you’d do well to read danah boyd’s excellent write-up about the socioeconomic segregation between MySpace and Facebook, which would suggest that student media should have a presence on both platforms.

So I e-mailed some questions to the respondents to my earlier query to see how they’re using social media sites for their student media. Rather than try to condense comments down into short bites of information, I’m including all three responses I received to my e-mail query - from Vanderbilt, Florida Atlantic, and Wichita State U. - below the fold. If your student media is on Facebook or MySpace, drop a comment, and let us know your experience.

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Chris Carroll wrote a lengthy post about the NPPA multimedia summit. In case you weren’t listening, here’s the take from Digitaljournalist.org: The NPPA multimedia immersion workshop.

Editor’s Note: Regina McCombs has been producing multimedia for startribune.com, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s online site, since 1997. She has won numerous awards for her work, and teaches and speaks around the country about multimedia and the news business. I interviewed McCombs via Instant Messaging on Thursday, July 5.

ICM: You were at Poynter last week for a college-related program. You mentioned in an e-mail that you were thrilled to see the emphasis on new media. Care to share one or two things that you took away from the experience?

McCombs: It was great to see the emphasis on multimedia storytelling – that it wasn’’t just the photographers taking pictures and reporters writing text, but that both were gathering audio – and video – and even both writing and taking photos.

Designers were using Flash and thinking about structuring large stories. Very exciting. The other great thing was to see them all working in a pod all together.

That’’s something that people who’’ve worked in newspapers a long time aren’’t very experienced at –- working together at every step of the process, not just when your part is finished.

It’’s a very important, but not much discussed, new media skill.

ICM: That sort of leads into my next question. You’ve had the chance to watch how the news industry has grappled with “new media” for over 10 years. What have been the biggest changes that impact students who will be going into the industry soon? Is that level of teamwork and planning you just mentioned among them?

McCombs: It’’s certainly among the important changes. It may be that some of the real “lone wolf” folks who’’ve populated newspapers will no longer be drawn to the profession.

Another important skill is being able to cope with a constantly changing job description. It can be frustrating to go from knowing exactly what elements you needed to produce a terrific text story, photo, TV story or graphic to grappling with what you need to make it work online. Just about the time we think we get it figured out, a new technology comes along or new information on what users need comes out. If you’’re not flexible, you’re very depressed.

ICM: I want to ask a question specific to most of our audience - i.e., college news organizations (not necessarily college journalism departments, per se): What are some concrete steps you would suggest to college media advisers and students as a way to move forward in this environment?

McCombs: Changing deadlines: Make sure you’’re not publishing once a week (or once a day), but updating as news happens.

Blog. Link to student blogs. Allow comments on articles and respond to the comments.

Publish Flickr (or other photo) feeds of campus events.

Do any multimedia you possibly can: podcasts, audio stories, video, whatever you can.

Build bridges across mediums. I know this can be very difficult in university environments where departments have long-standing divisions, but if media organizations can do it, colleges and universities need to take the hard steps as well.

ICM: Following up on that, let’s say that a student is at a school where they don’t emphasize new media skills (because of lack of instructors, finances, or whatever), how would you recommend students go about learning the skills they might need for the future? Any sites you frequent? Books to read? etc.?

McCombs: Study local news sites, watch what they’re doing, decide what you like or don’t like. Read the multimedia blogs, join the newspaper video listserv. Tools have gotten very inexpensive — software like Audacity, SoundSlides, Studio or iMovie are all within student budgets. Take Poynter NewsU courses, which are free. Even if it’s a personal project, produce some multimedia to have on your resume. Find a local mentor at a newspaper or TV station.

The thing to keep in mind is that there are a lot of newspaper people learning this almost on their own, so it’s not impossible. I’ll say it again: find a mentor, or network with others learning it.

My must-read blogs are Teaching Online Journalism, Multimedia Shooter, Lost Remote and Cyberjournalist.net. There are about a dozen others I keep an eye on.

Journerdism, AndyDickinson.net, Broadcast & Podcast Gadgets, Common Sense Journalism, Getty Images News blog, Inside Online Video, Journalistopia, Multimedia Evangelist, Multimedia Reporter, News Videographer, NewspaperVideo — Chuck Fadely’s blog related to the list, Online Journalism Review, Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog, What the Duck, the X degree, yelvington.com

Journerdism should be in the must-read list, actually.

ICM: So, looking forward … You mentioned some “community-oriented” suggestions in your earlier response. Do you see any clear trends that might be important for college news media to get a handle on over the next couple of years? Is “community” something they should be focused on? Other trends?

McCombs: I hesitate to say there are “clear trends,” but integrating community and the newsroom seems to be the most popular recent one. College news organizations are a natural for community news, so it seems well within their reach, and young people are producing much of the “user-generated content,” so it would seem like a natural fit. Other things on the community side would include user ratings, tagging and reviews like you see on our vita.mn site.

This business has always been very “latest trend” oriented, so there’s every chance there are new ones out there developing as we speak.

Video is certainly the latest buzz word among publishers, so it’s an important skill to have in terms of finding that first job.

ICM: Mark Glaser recently posted a list of “10 reasons to be optimistic about the future of journalism.” Are you optimistic or pessimistic about what we’ve known as the newspaper industry? Why?

McCombs: Some of each. We just laid off a whole lot of people here at the StarTribune, many of them terrific journalists with online skills. That’s depressing. On the other hand, there’s a lot more interest from the newsroom in producing original content for the Web, so that’s exciting. There’’s also been a rush to push things the old media newsroom don’’t always quite understand, and we don’t have enough training to go around at this point. It’s a mixed bag.

But related to that, the best way for students to position themselves in this climate of layoffs and tightening budgets is to have Web –- especially multimedia -– skills. My feeling is that we will no longer hire people without multimedia skills, since we’re learning it’s cheaper to hire those skills at the beginning than have to train people in them after the fact.

ICM: What’s one lesson that you’ve learned over the past 10 years that you think would benefit students just coming out, a “wow, I wish I’d known that when I was starting!” lesson?

McCombs: The lessons keep evolving, so what I learned 10 years ago probably wouldn’t be relevant today. Understanding the differing cultures of different media organizations was a tough struggle when I moved from TV to the newspaper. Adaptability is huge. Commitment to life-long learning is important. The studying never ends in this business. Living with uncertainty is a certainty.

ICM: What’s one project you’ve worked on recently that you’d like to point people to as a showcase of your work. Any “back story” that would explain the project?

McCombs: I’’m very proud of “A People Torn: Liberians in Minnesota. It is the best example of cross-newsroom participation we’’ve done to date. It’’s rich with multimedia, the navigation completely integrates the text stories into the rest of the project, and it’’s an important story that has not been covered. It came about after our international reporter, Sharon Schmickle, wrote a story on local Liberians that caught my interest, since my neighbors are Liberian. We started brainstorming on doing a project and jointly pitched it. She and Jerry Holt, the photographer, did much of the work gathering multimedia, our designers were amazing, and we got great support from all the managers.

The project kept growing and growing as we found more information, so organizing it and coordinating it became a challenge. Much of the online staff dug in to work on it. A copy editor (and blogger) from the newsroom worked on titles and links, instead of relying on the Web staff alone. Our Flash designer came up with a navigation system that shows you what you have already seen. Letting people’’s creativity run wild was exciting.

Pitching it meant writing a very complete proposal on what both the newspaper and online components would be, who would work on it, what the timing was. Online managers bit on it right away, the newspaper side took more convincing. In the end, I think everyone was happy.

As many college media outlets grapple with incorporating video into their bag of journalistic tools, we also grapple with the ethics of video storytelling. A great contribution to helping us deal with that question was added recently on the Newspaper Video Yahoo Group in the form of the Chicago Tribune’s video ethics policy. I asked Tom Van Dyke, Tribune photographer, if I could post the Tribune’s new video ethics policy on the blog, and he consented. Below the fold is the entire policy. Look at it, figure out what you need, and work it over for your own situation. I’ve also e-mailed Meg Theno, who wrote most of the policy in hopes of finding out more information.

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Judging from frequent posts to the CMA listserv, more and more former students are attempting to get college media outlets to remove news items from their online archives. The Washinton Post may have pointed out a way for college media to divert those requests with an article about online reputation management firms: Calling in pros to refine your Google image.

Google’s ubiquity as a research tool has given rise to a new industry: online identity management. The proliferation of blogs and Web sites can allow angry clients, jealous lovers or ruthless competitors to define a person’s identity. Whether true or not, their words can have far-reaching effects.

Charging anything from a few dollars to thousands of dollars a month, companies such as International Reputation Management, Naymz and ReputationDefender don’t promise to erase the bad stuff on the Web. But they do assure their clients of better results on an Internet search, pushing the positive items up on the first page and burying the others deep.

The most frequent reason former students seek out the campus press is because of what I’ll politely term “youthful indiscretions” that show up in police blotter stories. Five years away from college, these former students find that those police blotter items show up high in search engine results.

From various discussions, it’s pretty clear that student media outlets aren’t going to erase history, so the only real avenue for change would be for these individuals to push the offending item farther down in the search results by getting online and becoming more of a digital presence - through their own web sites, comments on weblogs, and social networking sites. There’s nothing inherently wrong with trying to ensure that relevant, current information shows up at the top when people search your name.

So next time someone asks you to remove something from the digital archives, after you decline their request, you might point them to this article from the Post, which can help explain how they can manage their online identity.

Via cyberjournalist.net, there’s this fascinating online chat with New York Times digital editor Jim Roberts. Roberts discusses a lot of things, but one thing that should be of interest to college media folks is the discussion about reader comments (something we’ve discussed previously).

The first thing that readers should know is that unlike some other news sites, we review every single comment that readers send in. We have considered trying software that filters profanity or doing what other sites do and allowing readers to flag objectionable comments. But so far we have not found anything that substitutes for having trained editors or news assistants read each one to make sure it is suitable for publication.

So, what is suitable? Well, we do want to know what people think, and we grant our readers a degree of leeway in criticizing newsmakers and in finding fault with how we present the news. But we draw the line in these ways:

1.) No profanity. No obscenity. No asterisks that take the place of letters in objectionable words.

2.) No name calling or insults. I don’t like it when I see the words “idiot” or “moron” or “fascist.” I can be somewhat tolerant of harsh criticism of public officials, but I am super-aggressive in deleting comments in which other commenters are being attacked. And while I don’t mind criticism of The New York Times, personal attacks on our reporters won’t be tolerated. And forget about ethnic, racial, religious or sexual slurs. Finally, try not to dominate the conversation so that other people have the opportunity to express their opinions even if they disagree with yours.

3.) Stay on point. Comments that stray from the topic are pointless and will be bounced. And we tend to set the bar even higher when we have a huge flow on a certain subject and some of the sentiments seem repetitive.

4.) Don’t bother sending press releases.

5.) Don’t rage and don’t SHOUT. Lot’s of readers seem to think that UPPERCASE comments are more effective in getting their points across. We prefer a more tempered conversation.

6.) Please use your real name. We don’t require this but we’d like to know who you are. If you sign your name Bill Clinton or Frank Zappa, we’ll in all likelihood delete it, unless we’re certain you’re the former president or the reincarnated Mother of Invention.

Since Kate deals with political issues, it’s worth taking a second to mention one specific problem we have in that area. We’re constantly on the lookout for sock puppets and aliases. If you’re working for a candidate, tell us. Your comment could still be valid and worthy of being published. But if you mislead us, forget it.

A couple of final notes. We’re not perfect; on more than one occasion we’ve let bad things slip through. Readers can help us by drawing attention to any comments that seem to cross the lines as I’ve spelled them out above. We also don’t have a huge squad of people moderating the comments. It takes time to go through them all, and it’s not unusual for comments to sit for an hour or more awaiting approval. And we have even fewer people doing it at night and on weekends. So, please be patient.

I’m on record as supporting something I’ll call “passive moderation,” but it’s nice to see the Times reveal their policy. I don’t necessarily agree that it’s the best way, but they’ve obviously put a lot of thought into their approach. This week, I actually used the “flag as offensive” button on Washingtonpost.com, and it was nice to feel like I was a part of the community, keeping the conversation going forward instead of getting mired in personal attacks.