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By Bryan, on August 19th, 2010
This summer, I had the opportunity to travel back to my hometown, Beaumont, Texas, and visit my college newspaper stomping grounds – the University Press.
Student Publications Director Andy Coughlan led me through the offices, which have been expanded greatly since my time working until all hours of the night to get out a twice-weekly paper. The equipment is obviously different. There’s no typesetter, no UPI dot-matrix printer, no photo darkroom, no Compugraphic computers with 5-inch floppy disk drives.
 The home page of the University Press It was a surprise, then, to find out that the University Press is going to begin posting online content this fall for the first time. Previously, they’ve posted PDF versions of their print publication. Now, they’ll be using College Publisher to begin posting online.
Part of the impetus for the effort is the fact that Lamar will have a football team this fall for the first time in 20 years (I was in college when the school killed its football program. We editorialized in favor of the move).
I can’t begin to express how weird it felt to be a person who’s all about moving news online and the student newspaper I worked on is only now moving into the 21st century.
I spent a few minutes with Coughlan discussing the ins-and-outs of publishing content first online. I’ll repeat a few of the things we talked about, because they seem to crop up often in my travels and in e-mail conversations with journalists:
First, break news online. This is important. No, it’s essential. If you publish once or twice a week and you’re not “publishing” the score from Saturday’s football game until Wednesday, you’re not doing anyone any favors. Fans already know the score and most of the details of the game, so you’re printing old news, which, as you may have guessed, is an oxymoron. As soon as you can, put up the score and some of the essential details of the game. It’s a practice that will serve you well when you get into the “real” world. Then work on a forward-looking story for the print edition.
Second, the online audience is not the print audience. Although there are more students getting information via the Internet, they’re not necessarily using that medium for school news. The bulk of traffic is still coming from faculty, administrators, parents, alumni and prospective students. That means a couple of things: 1) you’re not cannibalizing your print audience by putting things on the web first, and 2) your advertising strategy is going to have to be different, because your audience is different.
Finally, embrace the tools of the web to tell stories online. I repeat this so often it’s become a cliche, but if you’re an editor or a copy editor and a reporter turns in a story without at least three hyperlinks to related content, they are not finished with the story! The hyperlink is the most basic building block of Web content. Get that right, at least.
By Bryan, on August 18th, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education had an article recently about college newspapers abandoning “template-driven” College Media Network for open-source content management systems (CMS): For College Newspapers, Prepackaged Online Versions are Yesterday’s News.
The article quotes the editor of the Daily Texan about how they now have so much more control over the presentation of the material on their web site:
The site made its debut this past spring semester. The editors can now position stories and headlines where they want them, depending on the flow of the news, and showcase different kinds of media. They couldn’t do that before.
Ms. Winchester said the freedom is invaluable. “Students are working on our Web site, and students are deciding how the Web site will look,” she said.
However, I have to make the point that I have been making for several years: It’s not the CMS. It’s the journalism. A CMS is a tool, just like a hammer, or fire, or whatever other analogy you’d like to throw in there. It doesn’t necessarily help or hinder your ability to tell stories. As Madison McCord, a student, wrote for us a while back, even a hand-coded html site can produce good content and design.
But what use is a shiny new CMS if you’re still producing stale, shovelware-esque content?
For instance, the day the Chronicle story came out, the Daily Texan has a story about downtown parking, and yet there is no link to the City of Austin Transportation Department web page, which I found in a 2-second search of teh Google.
Or, take this breezy summer story about desserts with alcohol in them. The story mentions two specific local establishments that serve these cold refreshments, and yet doesn’t provide a link to the web page of either 219 West or Dolce Vita’s Facebook page, both of which – again – I found via teh Google.
In short, it’s Shovelware (you can read the same story in the PDF of the issue here).
And then there is the issue of site design. When vast numbers of site visitors enter your site through individual story pages (via Google searches or through social network links via Twitter or Facebook), that shiny front page positioning thing misses them completely.
I’m mainly writing this to reinforce something I said in 2007: It’s not the CMS – it’s the journalism. Period.
Web-first means thinking about alternate ways to tell stories. To think about video, to think about audio, to think about maps, to think about alternate ways to illustrate information to grab people’s attention. It means to think about how to create a community around your web site. To eschew traditional journalistic “journalism as lecture” mindset and think about “news as conversation”.
If nothing else, get your students to check out this checklist of things they could be doing online (for free!). If they aren’t doing those things, what difference is a different content management system going to make?
I’m sure there will be more migration to open-source CMS’s in the next year, and new hosting options. But let’s keep the main thing the main thing.
By Bryan, on August 5th, 2010
 The CICM Story Project • Wednesday, Oct. 27, 1-6:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 28, 9 a.m.-9 p.m., continues intermittently until 6:30 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 31 (schedule allows regular convention participation)
College journalists and advisers looking for an intense hands-on multimedia training experience taught by some of the nation’s most pioneering pros will have a unique opportunity during the ACP/CMA National College Media Convention in Louisville this October.
The CICM Story Project, a special four-day extended workshop beginning Oct. 27, will take 60 participants and outfit them with audio, video and computer gear along with support from a team of expert coaches. Attendees will receive both classroom training and field experience as they produce and launch by workshop’s end the interactive site “Main Street Stories: 12 Blocks in 12 Hours.”
(Click to expand)
This immersive workshop will allow participants to learn practical multimedia skills they can take back to their newsrooms and into the professional workplace. More than just an academic exercise, this workshop will have participants producing content that can serve as real and lasting additions to their portfolios.
The workshop will feature a dozen instructors and coaches, including David Stephenson, winner of the 2010 Pictures of the Year International multimedia news story; Seth Gitner, nationally award-winning multimedia producer/editor with Roanoke.com, now at Syracuse University; Carissa Ray, MSNBC.com multimedia producer; Lee Clontz, former New York Times, CNN web developer; Carrie Pratt, multimedia producer for the St. Petersburg Times; Jim Hayes, former TNN/CMT network producer; Meg Fenton, former photojournalist/multimedia producer for the Chattanooga Times Free Press; with additional new media experts/instructors. The final list of instructors is subject to change. Participants will work with instructors in a group setting, in small teams and one-on-one.
Workshop participants will actively learn multimedia story planning, audio and video content capture and editing, and other tools and tips for executing compelling online story packages. The workshop will begin with an intensive story development and production instruction session on Wednesday.
On Thursday, workshop participants will hit the streets in Louisville to cover character-driven stories on 12 specific blocks near the convention hotel. Content gathered by attendees will be produced and edited with assistance from the professional instructional staff throughout Friday and Saturday.
The workshop’s final product will be added to the national “Mapping Main Street” collaborative documentary media project, sponsored in part by Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR. The site created by workshop participants will be unveiled to all convention attendees during the Sunday morning general awards and keynote session.
The CICM Story Project workshop is an initiative of CMA’s Center for Innovation in College Media. Participants will work exclusively with the workshop Wednesday and most of Thursday, Oct. 27-28 and during special sessions Friday through Saturday, Oct. 29-31. The workshop schedule is designed to allow attendees the opportunity to also participate in most convention activities.
Workshop participation is limited to 60 individuals, with both students and advisers invited. There is a $129 pre-convention workshop fee required for enrollment. Participants will work in teams and be provided video cameras and accessories, audio recorders and access to Apple laptop computers with necessary software. Participants are encouraged to bring a personal digital still camera and are encouraged to bring other personal gear, though it’s not required.
This workshop will fill up quickly, so immediate registration is recommended. Registration will be available within a couple of weeks at the Associated Collegiate Press web site. If you want the best and most challenging ACP/CMA/CBI conference experience, you’ve found it.
By Bryan, on August 5th, 2010
 Via Dan at College Media Matters, we find the Princeton Review’s “Top 20 Best College Newspapers.”
Wow. What a list. Some names you probably recognize: Yale, Texas, North Carolina, Duke, Harvard, Maryland. The entire list is reproduced at CMM. (Dan has also added 15 other papers he believes should be on the list.)
Pretty impressive, eh? Unfortunately, the list is complete and utter bull.
How do I know? I mean, it’s the Princeton Review, right? It has “Princeton” in the name, so there must be something there. They must have some pretty impressive methodology to quantify what are the 20 “Best” college newspapers in a country with around 2,000 such newspapers, right? They must have had a huge matrix of quantitative and qualitative measures and operational definitions of “best” to come up with this list.
Sadly, no.
This is the methodology for naming the “top 20 college newspapers”:
The 62 ranking lists are based on surveys of 122,000 students (average 325 per campus) at the 373 schools in the book during the 2009-10 and/or previous two school years. The 80-question survey asked students about their school’s academics, administration, campus life, student body, and themselves. The surveys were completed online at http://survey.review.com.
The question they asked students about the newspaper on their college campus: “How popular is the newspaper?”
How popular is the newspaper?!?!?!
Setting aside the obvious epic fail that is popular=best (c.f., Fox News), the survey question is flawed because it asks people about what other people think. Who cares? Really, is that verifiable?
Look, I may think the Daily Eastern News is very popular on Eastern’s campus. But if you were to ask me to prove it, I’d have to get some facts to back it up, maybe survey some students, maybe get some circulation/return figures, things like that. Did every student who responded to Princeton Review’s survey do that? That’s a rhetorical question.
As well, how on earth do you rank college newspapers based on the opinions of people who have no interaction with other college newspapers? I mean, do most University of Texas students read the Daily Collegian at Penn State?
How do you even rank anything in a survey without using an ordinal survey question?
The answer is: You don’t. Unless you’re peddling some kind of b.s. college ranking book for $22.99.
And this is NOT a knock on any of the papers on the list. I’m pretty sure they are high-quality journalistic outlets. But I haven’t done any research to find that out. And neither has the Princeton Review. That’s the point.
Look, I know people like lists. I get asked frequently to give a list of student news outlets who are doing innovative things online. I can never rank them. Why? Because the most innovative student online outlets all excel at different things. And who am I to quantify which ones are best? Obviously, I’m not the Princeton Review. Maybe I should just ask some random students off the street how popular the student news web site on their campus is and rank them that way.
I haven’t delved into the other rankings in the Princeton Review’s survey, although the “Best College Radio Station question” is like unto the newspaper one: “How popular is the radio station?” But if those two are indicative of the kind of high quality survey methodology Princeton Review is basing their “Best” list on, I’m guessing the entire rest of the book is filled with fertilizer as well.
And, yes, I realize they’ve been publishing this since 1992.
Anyone who bases any decision on what college to attend based on this type of pseudo-scientific stuff should probably consider whether going to college is in their best interests to begin with.
By Bryan, on August 5th, 2010
 As we gear up for the new school year, some housekeeping matters:
1. Later today or tomorrow, we will be releasing details about the intensive, hands-on multimedia workshop that will be taking place during the fall National College Media Convention in Louisville, Ky., Oct. 27-31. Stay tuned.
2. Every so often, I invite people interested in college media to post here on the site. In the past, we’ve had guest submissions by Brad Arendt from Boise State, Kiyoshi Martinez (still with the most popular post ever on the blog), and Madison McCord, among others, not to mention the work from our interns over the past three semesters.
So as a new semester begins, I’m putting out the hat again to ask for new contributors, new voices, some fresh perspectives to add to the conversation here on the blog. I’m sure some readers would like to read more than this grumpy old guy saying “Get off my hyperlinks!” all the time.
If you’re interested, e-mail me at scmurley -at- gmail.com.
By Bryan, on July 22nd, 2010
The Media Consortium is based in Chicago. Note the deadline of Aug. 6.
Title: Marketing and Social Media Intern
Job Description: The Media Consortium, a network of 45 leading independent media outlets, is seeking an intern to develop communities on social networking sites (including, but not limited to, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace); track the impact of blogs, articles and projects, and research new media trends and technologies that would be of use to our members.
This is an exciting position and we encourage creative work and thinking about community-building, technology and the future of journalism
Duration: 15-20 hours/week for 4 months, beginning late August. Applications must be in by August 6!
Duties: Intern will play a key role in crafting and measuring social networking campaigns to increase the audience and influence of progressive, independent media.
Tasks include:
- Experiment with new social networking tools and technologies to increase audience
- Work with TMC staff to develop and implement promotion strategy and identify distribution partners for TMC content, including blogs and reports
- Write weekly news round-up blogs as needed
- Manage TMC pages on FaceBook, YouTube and other sites
- Research potential TMC funders
- Track reprints of TMC blogs and articles
- Assist as needed with Media Wire project
Qualifications:
- Strong writing skills
- Ability to self-manage and meet deadlines
- Familiarity with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Delicious, and GoogleAnalytics
- Love of independent media
- Fascination with new media tools and strategies
- Some College
- 3.0 GPA or higher
Compensation: Interns will be paid a travel stipend of $100 per month, plus occasional meals and coffee should they work in office. The Media Consortium will strive to develop intern’s professional skill set and work with schools to arrange college credit. Interns will leave with a signed letter of recommendation from TMC staff. As the majority of this work will be online, telecommuting is an option for candidates with sufficient experience. Women and people of color strongly encouraged to apply. NO ATTACHMENTS PLEASE. Please email your resumé, cover letter, references and a list of your top five online media outlets to Erin@themediaconsortium.com to apply.
By Bryan, on July 22nd, 2010
Full details here.
Please Note: Students @ Work Internships are paid at minimum-wage and structured to last approximately 12 weeks. Program dates are Sep 13th – Dec 3rd. Course Credit is available. Resume and Cover Letter are required. Students should have a strong academic record (3.0 strongly preferred). Students must have completed their sophomore year in college prior to the start of the internship. In addition, students may not have graduated college or graduate school prior to the start of the internship (i.e. STUDENTS MUST BE ENROLLED IN SCHOOL DURING THE TIME OF THIS INTERNSHIP). Students seeking college credit are strongly encouraged to apply. Note to International Students: All international students will be required to provide documentation of proper visa paperwork prior to your arrival if accepted to the program. Due to the high volume of candidates for Turner’s Internship Program, interested students are encouraged to apply for openings as soon as possible, as these positions will be filled on an ongoing basis. Future semester Internship postings will be available after the current semester deadline.
By Bryan, on July 20th, 2010
 College Media Review, a publication of College Media Advisers, Inc., is a great resource for college media advisers and journalism faculty. It’s also available for free online. The latest edition includes an article by Jeff Halliday about mobile reporting. You can download the PDF (5.5 MB) here.
By Bryan, on July 19th, 2010
I’ve created a page (under “Resources” above) with links to social media guidelines from various organizations. If you know of some links that I haven’t included, please include a link in the comments or e-mail me directly at scmurley -at- gmail.com.
By Bryan, on July 18th, 2010
“I don’t find it very comforting that there’s like a world of people who don’t agree with my feelings about my own show, but that’s okay with me. Like, I don’t have to feel good about that.
I feel like, you know, you make something, you put it out in the world and you want people to have feelings about it, and the feelings can include, they hate you and that seems okay. And the fact that they get to say it and it gets to stick to my name, I feel like even that seems okay.”
Ira Glass on comments in an interview with “On the Media”
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