1. Crime map
Estimated time to produce: 30 minutes a week

If your campus puts out a regular police log — which most college police departments do — setting up a crime map like this one is easy and your readers will love it. Go to Google Maps and under the “my maps” feature, set up your new map. Plot each crime from the police log onto the location in which the crime took place and spice it up using relevant icons and colors.

Why your readers will love it: It’s a digestible way to read about crime on campus. It’s also more personal because they can see where crimes happened in relation to their own locations.

Update the map once or twice a week.

2.  “Trending topics” pages
Estimated time to produce: 1 hour initially, 15 minutes for each additional update

I stole this idea from Twitter. Much like Twitter lists “trending topics” on their home page, you can maintain go-to pages for the trending topics and issues on your campus. After the initial setup, maintaining the pages is simple.

For example, at Cal Poly, a big issue is a possible college-based fee increase. It’s something students care about and want to read more about. On our “trending topics page” (which we call “hot topics” but you can come up with a catchier title than that) we link to recent articles about the topic, letters to the editor and columns, as well as all relevant multimedia.

Students can find everything they need to know, and it’s accessible from our homepage (our brand new homepage on our brand new web site, might I add).

3. Event calendar using Google Calendars
Estimate time to produce: 1 hour a month

Although I couldn’t find an example of a college publication doing this (if you have one, let me know in the comments and I’ll add it to the post), a Google Calendar of campus/community events could easily become a popular feature for college students. UPDATE: Batmoo from the comments informed me of a gCal system on The Boar (a student-run magazine for the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo) and adds some insight: 

 The flexibility of gCal allows us to embed a small version in our sidebar on the home page, and full-scale version on its own page. It’s super easy to use, and changes propagate instantly, plus it has built-in support for RSS and iCal, which is a nice bonus. Downside is that it’s not searchable.

At the start of each month, editors can compile a list of events — which they’re probably doing anyway for story ideas — and throw them onto a calendar.

It’s a win-win situation: reporters can use it as a resource for staying on schedule, and readers can use it as a resource when planning their weekends.

Now comes the bonus: Spend the time to develop these pages and promote them (in print if possible) so they gain a steady flow of traffic. After that happens, throw a few ads on each of these three pages and you’ve got yourself an extra flow of money every month.  Not bad, eh?

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The free photo-sharing software Flickr is a quick, effective way to archive your photos, maintain a remote backup and embed slideshows like this:

Although there are other means of creating slideshows for your news site — like Slideshow Pro (used by College Publisher) and Soundslides Plus — there are advantages to using Flickr:

• Others can embed your slideshow on their sites/blogs
• Slideshow can be viewed full-screen at high resolution
• The photos are tagged and searchable in one of the largest photo-sharing Web sites on the web
• You don’t need to have access to your newsroom’s server to get the photos– only an Internet connection
• You can always go back and download the full-resolution image if your original gets erased
• Flickr makes the slideshow for you — you just grab the embed code
• The Flickr account  can be synced with Facebook or your paper’s blog

The only catch is that Flickr doesn’t use albums– but there’s a simple way around it: tags.

The unique tag is the key to embedding individual slideshows. For example, the slideshow above has a unique tag of “big west championship ’09” (which is the tag used to embed) so that the embedded photos don’t include all basketball photos ever uploaded to the account.

The slideshow option isn’t the most obvious feature. After clicking on your unique tag, look for the gray “slideshow” button on the top right:

If the tags concept is too much, consider buying a Pro Account. It’s only $24.95 a year (which averages to about two bucks a month).  With it, you get unlimited uploads and storage, unlimited sets and collections (which how you’d organize the photos), statistics and HD video uploads.

If your student media outlet is already on Flickr, please link us to your account in the comments so we can see how you’re using it.

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News writing for the web is a challenge. Not necessarily because it’s hard, but because it means changing the way you think. This lesson will be a foundation for future lessons on audio, video, Flash and all the fun skills you want to learn. But be patient. We’re taking this one step at a time.

Writing for the web is a different experience– you have to think about search engines and reader attention span and site traffic. This is about more than copying and pasting your stories from InDesign to your CMS. It’s about mastering an art that few in the college media industry get. Read the rest of this entry →

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