February 8, 2012 in blogging, General Media
I’ve been busy this week working on a website redesign for a colleague, but I’ll be blogging and tweeting this weekend from the Mid-America Press Institute’s “Managing Change” workshop in St. Louis. You can follow along on Twitter at @cicm or @mpinews and read the stories on mpinews.org.
January 31, 2012 in blogging, career talk, General Media, industry news
UPDATE: via Jason Kottke (and my RSS reader) this related, lengthy piece from journalist Brian Lam, whose site I’ve never read.
Last week, my intro to multimedia classes discussed RSS feeds, and why they were a good thing. I love RSS feeds for keeping up to date on matters at the intersection of technology, journalism and college media. A lot of people have started using Twitter as an alternative to RSS readers, but I don’t find that a good thing, necessarily. The real problem for me is the amount of information that come through the RSS reader in a day. I was amazed at how much content some of the blogs I follow was pumping out in a day, so I decided to try an experiment. I “bankrupted” my Google Reader yesterday (Monday, Jan. 30, 2012) at 4 p.m. Central Standard Time. There were no unread items.
It’s now 2:30 CST on Tuesday, and I just went in to see how many items were in the unread RSS inbox. As you can see, there are 276 unread items. And I don’t follow any traditional media outlets (NYT, Washington Post, etc.).
The main contributors to this RSS glut?
Five sites, 170 new items in less than 24 hours!
Now, granted there’s probably a lot of good information in some of those blog posts, but who can keep up? I’m sure most people don’t read all these firehoses of niche information, preferring to focus on one or two. But if you’re trying to stay up-to-date on the latest happenings in a certain area, it’s not always an option.
It’s no wonder one of the more recent tech terms to become a buzzword is information overload.
I’m sure someone has a workable situation for this conundrum. I think one of the things we’ve created with the fast pace of the Internet is the need for constant content, some of which is little more than a picture and a blurb from another blog or a press release. And that’s not helping us get quality information, much less act upon the information we’re getting.
This isn’t specifically a college-media-related issue. But as journalists of the future, one of our college students’ key functions will still be to serve as trusted curators or information sherpas for people who don’t have time to follow all this content. And that means they will have to find strategies and tools to go where the information is and discover what’s important without having to spend hours in front of a screen sifting through stories.
September 15, 2011 in blogging, Blogroll, CICM shop talk, industry news, Links
Working through some blog housekeeping over the past few days, I noticed that there were some people whose blogs I respected that I wanted to add to the blogroll on the right side of the page.
As I started looking through the list, I realized there were a few of the sites on the list that are no longer updating. In fact, one: College Rag (which I wrote about in 2008), appears to have ceased to exist altogether. I didn’t link to their name, because it appears to have gone dormant, replaced by an ad site.
I don’t have so much of a problem with people who stop updating their personal web sites or blogs. People get new jobs, they decide they don’t have as much to say, or they want a break. That happens to all of us. But I do regret when sites go totally dark. It’s a classic case of link rot.
July 17, 2011 in blogging
It’s the middle of the summer, so there’s not much going on in the college media world other than people moving content management systems, putting out college editions and getting ready for fall. As such, expect light blogging the rest of this month.
For those who need something to read, I’d encourage you to check out the ongoing Guardian UK coverage of the News International phone hacking scandal as it spreads.
In tech geekery, the news recently has been about Google+. I started experimenting with it last week, and I’ll have some thoughts after a bit of experimentation. In the meantime, if you don’t have an invite yet, hit my e-mail – scmurley – at- gmail.com, and I’ll invite whoever I can.
Stay cool.
January 11, 2011 in blogging, innovation
Last week, I was interviewed by Marc Parry of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s technology blog for a story about the upcoming paywall at the O’Colly at Oklahoma State University.
You can read the article above, but I hope it comes through that I welcome the experimentation in new business models for college news, but don’t expect this particular experiment to be any sort of magic bullet.
I do think there will be a number of college newspapers looking at this experiment closely, and I hope the O’Collegian is open with the results.
December 25, 2010 in blogging
Image via Wikipedia
Here’s wishing the best to you and yours for this holiday season. We’ll be out of pocket for the next week, so I’ll see you after the first.
Thanks to everyone for reading this year, and thanks to all the student journalists and journobloggers who’ve made this an exciting year in media.
November 25, 2010 in blogging, hope for the future
Ed. Note: I wrote this last Thanksgiving week, and it pretty much sums up my attitude again this Thanksgiving. Hoping you and yours have a good holiday. (edited slightly to reflect time differences).
For our U.S. readers, this is the week of Thanksgiving, when schools call a recess from the frantic pace of the semester to allow everyone to meet with their families and friends and overdose on various foodstuffs and enjoy watching games of skill and chance involving an oblong leather ball. There’s also some shopping involved.
But the principle meaning for the holiday is to stop from the bustle of life to reflect and give thanks or express gratitude for the blessings of the present day.
Given that charge, I’ve put down a list below of some of the things I’m thankful for about college media this holiday season. Feel free to add your own in the comments below. Happy Thanksgiving.
I’m thankful …
… for the Internet, and the challenges and opportunities it has brought to college media and the news media in general. Without it, we’d know a lot less than we do now – for good and for bad.
… for college media outlets that continue to produce journalists who provide some accountability to the powers that be on college campuses across the country.
… for Organizations that help protect the First Amendment rights of student journalists in high schools and colleges.
… for Organizations that protect college advisers from undue and unwarranted threats from administrators who don’t want to see the student media do its job.
…for Organizations (like ACP/NSPA and JEA) that help provide training and recognition for student journalists beyond what can be given on many campuses.
… for Journalism departments that work closely with student media outlets and support a truly student-run college media experience (especially my own department at Eastern Illinois).
… that there have been no massive layoffs (that I know of) at any college media outlet in the U.S.
… for college journalists who are shifting to a web-first mind-set in publishing news, trying new ideas and overcoming old print/broadcast/web silos.
… for college media outlets that are continuing to find piecemeal solutions to the business model conundrum.
… that part of my academic career is watching college media change before my eyes, and seeing the successful collegiate online journalists of today move forward and succeed in their careers.
… that I can be a blogger AND a journalist, and for five years (as of November, 2010) of blogging about college media and the online world.
… for Chris Carroll and Ralph Braseth, who have been integral to this effort (the CICM and the ICM weblog) from day one.
… for the many colleagues (advisers and professors) who have listened, challenged my assumptions and offered ideas and inspiration as we’ve had this conversation about the future of college journalism.
Every so often I tend to get a little bit pessimistic about The Future of Journalism, possibly because we (collectively: academics, journalists and business folk) tend to circle the same topics every 6-12 months like dogs eating our own vomit. But it’s helpful to take a step back and see how far we’ve come.
We’ve come a long way from where we were five years ago (YouTube was a new service at that time. Nobody had heard of Twitter because it didn’t exist). We’re not where we are going yet, but we’re farther along the track, and we’ll get to The Future mostly intact, I believe.
I’m reminded of a quote from Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy):
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
That’s the list as it stands now. What are you thankful for?
November 12, 2010 in blogging, CICM shop talk
As best I can tell, today marks the official 5th anniversary of the founding of this weblog. Yes, here is the first post.
It’s been a busy five years. Approximately 1,800 posts (about 1 per day, including 1,600 by yours truly), several workshops, numerous consultations and conferences, two contests, three interns and over 200,000 visitors. The staff here at ICM would like to thank those who have contributed, those who have stopped by and commented, and those who quietly read along.
On a personal note, there have been numerous people I could and should thank for the assistance and support over the past five years. Foremost among them are Chris Carroll and Ralph Braseth, who set this blog in motion in late 2005 with an e-mail asking me to set up a web site for them. “I’ll set up the site, but you have to provide the content.”
You can see how well that worked.
I would also like to recognize the support from my colleagues in the journalism department at Eastern Illinois University, who see the value in my research interests in this area and encourage me to continue.
As for the future, we’ve just begun. Thanks to College Media Advisers, Inc., we’ve got some exciting workshops planned for the future, and I’m still plugging away trying to keep up with the tsunami of changes in the news industry.
Stay tuned.
(photo courtesy flickr user Rob J Brooks under Creative Commons license)
November 10, 2010 in Academics, blogging, Tech Talk
Editor’s Note: This piece has been sitting in my “draft” folder since mid-September, which means it’s ancient in blog years. But since the topic is bound to come up again sometime soon (see the rule of online journalism discussion below), I’m posting it for posterity.
After five years of blogging about college media, I have formulated the following rule of online journalism discussion:
If you follow the “journorati,” i.e., the navel-gazing portion of the journalism industry that spends an inordinate amount of time talking about journalism, you will eventually hear the same arguments repeated, usually in 12-18 month cycles.
Which brings me to to the latest in a long-running, seemingly endless series of pearl-clutching, couch-fainting, concern-trolling articles about how journalism students are learning too much technology and not enough fundamentals.
This scene of the badly-scripted remake of “Groundhog Day” comes from Tony Rogers, a journalism instructor and journalism “Guide” at About.com (found via Dan Reimold). Rogers believes there is too much technology in journalism schools. The title of his article posted in September: Is There Too Much Tech Training at the Nation’s Journalism Schools?
NO.
This concludes another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.
For a more detailed response, follow me below the fold.
October 26, 2010 in blogging
This is your public service announcement for the week. Next Tuesday, Nov. 2, is an election day around the United States. In Illinois, early voting ends today. If your state has early voting, I’d encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity to cast your vote without having to stand in line on Tuesday.
If you can’t vote early at this point, make a point of doing so on Tuesday. It’s your civic duty.
