David Cohn interviews Scott Karp, the bright mind behind Publish2, a link aggregating system for journalists. Listen to the interview, and find a way to use Publish2 in your newsroom. Note: As Dave mentions, Karp is another proponent of link journalism. Read this post to understand some of what he’s talking about. Longtime readers of this blog should recognize a recurrent theme: the power of links.
h/t Jack Lail
Megan Taylor points out a series of posts by Mark Luckie at 10000 words focusing on college media web sites.
Here are the three posts:
Online Student Journalism: Best of the Best
Online Student Journalism: Outstanding Use of Multimedia or Social Networking
Online Student Journalism: Best Site Design
I encourage you to go check out the sites Mark highlights, because there’s obviously some good ideas in there (and some of the site designs he highlights are indeed very good).
But I will quibble with the way he ranks the sites. I don’t disagree, for instance, that the Florida Alligator is a really good online journalism site. Or, for that matter, any of the other top 7 school news sites he chose. But I wonder how many sites he’s looked at. I’d also note that he doesn’t mention *any* college TV or radio news sites. That’s a glaring omission.
Unless it’s a contest, I’m very loathe to “rank” schools about which ones are “best” in online news. For one thing, there are 2,000 student media organizations in the U.S. I guarantee I haven’t looked at half of their web sites. Have you, Mark?
For another thing, everyone has shortcomings. Is the site that produces great video better than a site that has high quality podcasts or mashups? Is a site that has a nice mashup better than a site that produces interactive Flash multimedia? Hmm. I don’t know.
The point I think I’m making is that I don’t like ranking with no methodology. We’re supposed to accept the 10000 words‘ edict about the top 7 college media sites because … well, … just because. Show us your work, Mark, or take out the rankings. I’ll happily post 7 sites that I think are doing good things online without ranking them. Here ya go:
Only one of those (InsideVandy) was on Mark’s list, but I’d put them up against any of Mark’s grouping.
Again, I’m not against any of the schools he listed. But I’m also not keen on ranking them. We’ve seen what kind of damage that sort of thinking can do with the BCS. Let’s not start with college news sites.
The Columbia Spectator put together a multimedia package about the protests that took place in 1968. Check out the intro page here. You can open the multimedia page using this link (or just click on the text in the intro page if you want the package to take over your browser).
Interestingly, the Spectator package has a static timeline graphic. Would that they’d known about Dipity.
h/t Andrew Young from UWire
Most of you know I have been testing the new 5.0 or polopoly version for College Publisher going on 4 months. I have been getting many emails and questions at the conventions about what it is like but by far the biggest question that gets put to me is in the vien of “we are thinking of switching but want to know what the new 5.0 system has to offer before we jump ship.” Note, this isn’t a direct quote from any one just a general wording.
I think since the problems of the “j run errors” many advisors and students are frustrated with CP and that is why many are looking at other options. Additionally, we all have probably attended or followed sessions on “new media” and our students now want to try some of these great things we have all learned about. Things which may not be easy to do, if possible at all under the current 4.0 system.
At the core however, I feel many advisors are over looking some key points. I quickly broke down what I see as positives and negatives for the CP system. This is a short list and by no means complete. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments section.
In honor of Earth Day, Vanderbilt’s student media mothership InsideVandy presents a multimedia package called “The Green Tour.” There are stories, a video, audio slideshow, a map and a timeline. Each multimedia element pops up in a “lightbox” over the web page (Lightbox 2 source code here).
The entire thing is built into an HTML web page - not a Flash interface. This just proves that you don’t have to shoehorn everything into Flash to make a decent multimedia package.
Anyone else do something for Earth Day? Drop a comment or e-mail me - scmurley -at- gmail.com, and I’ll post the links.
The Tower student newspaper at Catholic University of America set up a separate blog to detail the Pope’s visit to campus. Updates (like this one) were sent to the WordPress-backed blog with a Blackberry phone.
h/t Andrew Young at UWire
Daniel Randolph at Loras College writes about the launch of LCTV13.com, the web site for the TV station at Loras College in Iowa. They’re using a WordPress install. You can read the details (and a gentle slam at our “print-centric” focus around here) at Daniel’s blog.
The Nevada Sagebrush did so. Check it out here. Interesting use of Twitter. Of course, they could have also used CoveritLive or UStream to videocast it.
h/t Greg Linch
Kyle Hansen reports on the Spartan Daily using CoverItLive for a budget forum in California. You can see the liveblog here.
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