Posts under ‘Community’

BigLickU launched recently. We’ve covered the site extensively in the past (see here and here), and I’ve e-mailed Chris Winston to see if I can get a log-in to look at some of the back-end features. I’ll update as details change.
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The Center for Citizen Media has released a report called “Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement.” It’s worth a gander, because it walks through many of the areas we talk about a lot here, and shows where there is success as well as failure. It was apparently written primarily by Lisa Williams of H20town and […]

Talk amongst the weblogs this weekend is about USA Today’s new web site redesign (shown above). The redesign itself is nice (although Sholin thinks it’s light on form and McAdams agrees). But what’s beneath the hood is what’s got people stirring.
Ken Paulson describes the changes thusly:

While we’ve refined the design, we’ve also expanded the journalistic […]

David Cohn, editor at NewAssignment.net, points to another interesting experiment in collaborative journalism (aka crowdsourcing) from NYC24, a new multimedia workshop at Columbia’s J-school.
Here’s David’s description:
On a public wiki they have written the skeleton of a story about bloggers being sued and hope to quickly create a community of interested bloggers, writers, whoever around that […]

I found this via Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users: RPM ‘07. The basics are this: you have 28 days to create an album’s worth of new musical material. It’s based on the same spirit that inspired NaNoWriMo - deadlines can help creativity.
We’re already well into the 28 days (entries must be postmarked by March […]

Tish Grier writes about a move by a local TV news station to get rid of their paid new staff in favor of citizen journalism content. It’s something college journalists should keep in mind:
I’m sick of the hype that says citizen journalism is “all the rage” when only a handful of people across the country […]

Steve Outing wrote a list of 10 words of advice for small newspapers for Editor & Publisher. Here’s the bullet point version (Outing’s list in bold), but you really need to read the whole thing. I’m adding college media-specific comments in italics.

Copy and build from the industry leaders
Outing lists a number of for-profit newspapers that […]

John Robinson blogs about the top 10 journalistic gifts he’d like to see for Christmas. Let’s see if I can summarize them in two words or less each:

Participation
Civility
Relevance
No Fear
Experimentation
Equipment
Performance=Promise
$100 computers
Accessible Style
Free WiFi!

Obviously, you’ll have to check his blog to see what each of those cryptic phrases means. In the Christmas spirit, let me add a […]

Daniel Sato is the web editor at San Jose State University’s Spartan Daily. It’s exciting to see them considering how to build the community around their newspaper online. But it’s not an easy road.
How then, does a school newspaper build a successful online community? The two main concerns heard most frequently about the Spartan Daily […]

Steve Yelvington “explains the Dunbar Number:”:http://www.yelvington.com/20060612/discovering_the_dunbar_number

bq. I’ve referred to the Dunbar number frequently in explaining to journalism and new-media audiences the concept of hyperlocal relevance. It works like this: If I have about 150 people in my inner circle, and I never see them in your newspaper, then your newspaper isn’t about me and my kind.

Can college media address the Dunbar number on campus? I think so.