The Spartan Daily’s live video experiment worked.

We put a big teaser on the front page of the paper today so students would know about it and then I put a brief notice in as a multimedia article on our site, so it was included in our RSS feed and e-mail edition. When it was time for the video to begin, I put the ustream embed code in the story and made it a breaking news story so a link to it showed up on every page on the site. I also recorded it, both in ustream and on a tape in the camera. After the meeting was over, people can watch the ustream recording, and I am uploading the higher quality version into our regular video player.

Check out Kyle’s comments here.

During the CICM/CMA New Media sessions in New York, I got to participate on a panel with Tori Saulnier, editor in chief of the Campus Lantern at Eastern Connecticut State University. Tori’s remarks about the Campus Lantern’s transition to an online-only publication are worth hearing, even if you’re just looking for ways to make your online presence more relevant on campus. Fortunately, Adam Hemphill recorded her remarks, and she’s agreed to share them via our blip.tv channel. It’s about an 8-minute clip.

Tori Saulnier, editor in chief of the Campus Lantern at Eastern Connecticut State University, speaks to advisers and students during a session at the Spring National College Media Convention in New York. The Campus Lantern was the first college student newspaper to abandon its print edition for online-only distribution in 2006.

Camera by Adam Hemphill

UPDATE (9-17-07): Link to Campus Lantern site fixed.

Hello from New York …

At least one group of my peers has banded together to fight the apathy for using the Web (and the lack of student-based social interaction at these conventions.)

Uh, Bryan … I think we have some competition! (more…)

Editor’s Note: The University Press at Florida Atlantic University has been hard at work this semester reinventing their web/print delivery methods. I asked adviser Michael Koretzky to see if he could get some students to share their experience of the overhaul. Their words follow. I want to share this as an example of how a weekly print publication can use the strengths of the web to complement their print edition. It’s a great idea for more college newspapers to experiment with. And if you’re already doing something similar, by all means, drop me an e-mail and share your experiences at scmurley -at- gmail.com. For the CMS, the front page is a Dreamweaver overlay page, with the guts in College Publisher. Koretzky says: “So the homepage is built and updated in DreamWeaver, while the current issue and daily web stories jump to CP.”

HARD AS HELL, FUN AS HELL

By UP staff

Today marks the 50th day of FAU’s new student media website. If the next 50 days don’t get any easier, we won’t make it past 100.

After perusing every other student media website we could find, we decided to try something that we hadn’t seen: one site that combines the following…

1. Daily Web-only stories.
2. Daily blogs.
3. Daily multimedia, most often video from the student TV station
4. Daily radio shows, from our student radio station

And we resolved to use only student content. That meant no wire. No adults.

Well, we figured out why we hadn’t found anyone else doing this. Because it’s really friggin’ hard. For starters, there were huge technical hurdles. We know about writing and editing and design and photography. But writing code eluded us. We had to hunt down students outside of our field to help us, and they weren’t always helpful.

And we had no more money to do this. We had to reallocate our existing budget for the print issue. And we had no more staff. It’s not like we have students beating on our newsroom door looking for low-paying work.

So the first thing we did to launch this new website was…gut our print edition.

We changed our weekly tab from a newspaper to a themed magazine. Each issue was planned at the beginning of the semester to focus on one subject, whether it’s a spring sports preview, SG elections preview, or a Black History Month special.

That last one showed just how multimedia we could get. The cover story was a roundtable discussion featuring students leaders from groups ranging from Black Student Union to College Republicans, debating racial issues of concern to them. The student TV station filmed and aired it, recutting highlights for our website, which we referred to in the print edition. And the student radio station promoted both the show and the story.

That issue turned out so well because our smaller print staff had weeks to plan it out. Meanwhile, the Web staff was charged with covering all breaking news – which it could do much quicker than the 10-day turnaround required in the print edition.

While that made sense to our readers – our Web hits skyrocketed from a few hundred a week to a few hundred a day – some professors and administrators were skeptical at first. Being in the urban environment of South Florida, they’re sophisticated enough to acknowledge and support our Web efforts. But they had reservations about the corresponding changes to the print edition.

When one print edition was nothing more than a man-on-the-street series of Q&As, they expressed concern – and in one case anger – that we’d bled the journalism out of the printed University Press. To their credit, they never mentioned the word censorship or even hinted at doing anything except their concern and disdain. So we had to explain that this was one of our just-for-fun themed issues, and that even during this particular week, we were practicing solid news journalism on the site.

But that’s one of the inherent problems with what we’re doing this semester: The print edition is still a weekly event that can be seen in racks all over campus. Despite the fact that our Web readership (6,000 weekly average) is more than our print run (5,000), the print edition is more ubiquitous.

We quickly discovered that everyone wants the Web edition to be innovative and strong, but they also want the print edition to stay the same. That didn’t seem practical to us – or our readers. Now, our readers can go online daily and read breaking news and themed blogs (Tuesday is SG, Thursday is sports…) and see slideshows and video from campus events. Then they can pick up the print edition to read a comprehensive account of FAU research (an upcoming issue).

This helps not only our readers, but our internal copyflow. With weekly themed issues, we can assign one editor and designer to be in charge weeks in advance. For our annual trek to the New York City Convention, for example, we have an FAU history-in-pictures issue already built.

And when we go to New York, we’ll be running our own convention blog at www.upressonline.com/nyc. Check it out, tell us what you think.

Megan Taylor, a student at the University of Florida, produced a map for this story on dating in Gainesville using Atlas. The story was for a section of Gainesville.com called “Undertone.”

Taylor describes her work on the map here.

BTW, Rick Burnes, one of the geniuses behind Atlas, will be speaking at our workshop at the end of March. If you’re a college media adviser or ESPECIALLY a student journalist, you should think about Nashville. Here’s more info.

Meranda Watling ends up in the Bloglines RSS reader. You might want to keep an eye out for this young journalist. Today she writes:

I am young, but even if I weren’t, I am more than willing to admit I do not know everything. I don’t, and I never will. Too many people, young and old, walk around thinking they know what’s best. They don’t. They think that because they know how to cover city council and read a building permit, that because they’ve sat through a murder trial or broke the story about a senator’s scandal they are somehow above the turmoil in the industry today. They aren’t.

As this quote says, the people who know everything are the ones who will be left in the dust by those who keep acquiring knowledge. Whether that knowledge is shooting video or editing Flash, or whether it’s simply acquiring a different mindset when approaching a story is irrelevent. The point is, they never settle. And too many editors and reporters in this business have settled. They’re just biding their time until they can retire and reminisce about that “world that no longer exists.”

That’s about the right attitude to have, and a very mature one at that. But it’s difficult to hold onto that humility (that’s a good word). Perhaps it’s going to be easier to hold onto in the newsroom of the future, since the outside environment is changing so drastically.

Last week, I e-mailed Amanda Getchel, the online editor of the Ball State Daily News to ask if she’d write down something about their use of mapping tools to display the campus crime report (see Ball State gets the map on for details). She replied, and below are her comments, lightly edited:

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