September 8, 2010 in College Media, Redesigns, Websites
Tom Nelson sends along a redesign for the Loyola Marymount Loyolan web site, which moved to a WordPress install over the summer from the previous College Publisher system.
Here’s a screenshot of the new look to the site:
The new template is Hybrid News.
Unfortunately, I do not have a screen capture of the old site design, and the Wayback Machine is no help.
August 30, 2010 in College Media, design, Redesigns, Websites
Jim Killam sends along word about the redesign of the Northern Star at Northern Illinois.
Here’s the new look:
And here’s what the site looked like a couple of years ago (most recent version I have):
In addition to the redesign, the Northern Star is now using TownNews as a CMS. Previously, they had a homegrown CMS solution.
August 26, 2010 in College Media, design, Redesigns, Websites
Onward State is an online-only publication for Penn State. Publisher Davis Shaver sends along news of their redesign for the new school year. “Major new features include community posting capabilities, community member profiles, and topic pages,” Shaver wrote in an e-mail.
Here’s the old design:
And here’s the new design:
More news above the fold, more graphics, and a lighter color scheme, along with the features mentioned above.
August 24, 2010 in College Media, design, Redesigns, Websites
New school year, new site designs. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be sharing screenshots of some of the online college news sites that have put on a new coat of digital pixie dust. If your media outlet has redesigned the web presence over the summer, drop me an e-mail at scmurley -at- gmail.com to be included in the coverage.
First up in the box, the Boise State Arbiter. The Arbiter last redesigned when they moved off the College Publisher CMS in 2009. Here’s the earlier redesign:
And here’s the new redesign:
The new design looks clean. Fewer rounded corners, a little less blue, and I like that they’ve pushed more news to the top of the page with the addition of the middle rail of stories, while also focusing more attention on the main photo carousel as well.
What do you think? Feel free to comment below.
July 12, 2010 in College Media, Student voices
Suzanne Yada, formerly of the San Jose State Spartan Daily (which is now housed on a “portal” site for SJSU media), offers advice for college journalists: reporters, editors, designers and online editors.
The entire list is worth a read, and too detailed for an excerpt to do it justice. Go read the whole thing.
April 14, 2010 in iPad, Tech Talk
As soon as the iPad was announced, Abilene Christian University was promising that The Optimist, the student newspaper at ACU, would have the first college news media iPad app.
A team of faculty and student researchers and developers from multiple departments at the university plan to have the Optimist ready for the iPad by the end of March. Optimist editors plan to employ the new platform to deliver a more converged form of media to the ACU community in addition to the print, online and iPhone app versions of the Optimist.
Sure enough, Dan Reimold reports at College Media Matters, the Optimist app is now available for download.
Here’s a video from ACU featuring faculty and student editors talking about the new app, and some footage of the app in action.
I downloaded the app over the weekend, as I was curious about what was included in this first student media effort on the Magical Unicorn Device.
Before I get into the details, let me give kudos to the students and faculty at ACU who worked so quickly to turn this app out. It works, and for what it does, it’s a perfectly serviceable app.
From the description in the iTunes app store:
Version 1.0 of the ACU Optimist App features:
• Dynamic content selector to allow you to move between sections
• Access to over five years of story archives
• Photo montages
• Updated ACU Wildcat Sports scores
A screen capture from the Optimist iPad app page.
So far, my response to the app has been lukewarm. It looks and feels a lot like a basic port of the Optimist’s WordPress-powered web site. The stories are listed in descending chronological order. Clicking on a headline takes you to the story page, which looks a lot like a standard WordPress single post page.
The text on screen is readable. the full-color photos are gorgeous. Depending on your WiFi, the stories load quickly when you click on the headlines. If you swipe your finger from the right side of the screen toward the left (near the top of the screen), you can also move from one section screen to the next section screen.
At the right side of the screen is a “Contents” tab that slides out to reveal four sections: News, Sports, Arts & Culture, and Opinion. Notice anything missing from that list? A dedicated section for multimedia content. For instance, the store description promises “photo montages,” but, poking around the app, I wasn’t able to find any.
Compare that with the online Optimist web site, which does suffer from a little too much “nav bar creep” (The tendency to add more and more nav bar links to different parts of a site). But prominent in the lower nav bar are links to its multimedia content (podcasts and videos).
And despite the promise of “converged media,” much of the Optimist’s online text content still lacks hyperlinks. Over several days of testing the app, I was able to find one story on the iPad app home screen that had a hyperlink to another web site (to be fair, this isn’t the app’s fault – most of the current stories on the web site don’t have hyperlinks either).
I assume the archive access is primarily available through the search feature in the contents tab. It would be nice to have monthly archive listing available as an option. I typed “2007″ into the search engine and came up with nothing.
In terms of iPad capabilities, the one “bug” I found in the app was that it doesn’t rotate to landscape view when you turn the iPad on its side, unlike most of the media apps I’ve looked at recently. This is not an iPad specific feature, it’s also part of the iPhone/iPod Touch user interface.
As I said, having looked through the iPad Software Development Kit, I give high praise to the ACU students and faculty for producing an app for this new computing device.
But my overall impression is that the Optimist development team could have spent more time working on the presentation and iPad feature list and not so much on being first out of the gate.
As this is version 1.0, there is promise for much more innovation out of this effort, and I look forward to see what uses they can make of features like location-awareness.
I hope the development team will look at what other news outlets are doing with their apps – check out the Reuters News Pro app for an example of weaving multimedia content into the home page, for instance – and improve the Optimist app in future versions.
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April 5, 2010 in industry news, Training, video
Colin Mulvaney writes an excellent post on his blog: Video at newspapers needs to improve – that I want to highlight because it’s as good a summary as any of the ways that newspaper-produced video needs to go to reach the storytelling heights that still photojournalism has reached in the past.
He identifies the following problems with much of newspaper video:
Some of these problems stem from the obvious fact that newspapers are still trying to figure out what works for online video, and still photographers are still learning the basics of video storytelling. And when some of the best newspaper videographers get shown the door, or land in academia (Hernandez and Gitner), or must shift careers for personal and geographical reasons, and others (like Mulvaney himself) get pulled off video duty, figuring out what works and indwelling those skills within newspaper staffers just gets that much harder.
A lot of this mediocrity is doubtless self-inflicted. Stories that work in print don’t work so well in video. Stories that benefit from video don’t always get the time they deserve to get it right.
But the greater point is that people (especially student journalists) who want to be videographers for newspapers need to spend a lot more time honing their craft. That includes paying attention to broadcast videographers. While I firmly believe that web-based video necessarily is different from broadcast video, the fact is that broadcast videographers have a lot to teach in terms of video storytelling.
Some of that honing of skills should come through classwork. But a newspaper journalist might only get a few weeks of video training in an intro class. The rest must come from practice and DIY learning (including some of the workshops Mulvaney mentions in his post above). To that end, below are several sites I’d recommend for more advanced DIY training:
Edit Foundry: Shawn Montano’s site hosted by NPPA focuses very sharply on the depths of video editing. What I like about the site is that Montano breaks down a concept – say, Video editing transitions – complete with detailed commentary across the entire video, along with screen grabs.
News Videographer: Angela Grant continues to explore videography from a newspaper veteran’s viewpoint, despite her career developments. An excellent resource.
Mastering Multimedia: Mulvaney’s blog is another excellent resource, which takes a more theoretical approach to multimedia storytelling. Even though he spends less time shooting video, his thoughts are worth the time to absorb.
Multimedia Shooter: Originally set spinning by Richard Koci Hernandez, this site is chock full of tutorials, advice, and inspiration. Not just about video, but a range of multimedia (see Multimedia Rules to Live By and Seven Steps to Train Yourself).
I’m sure there are other excellent sites around the web that focus on video gathering and editing. These are some I’m familiar with and enjoy reading. There are also some excellent sites (Mindy McAdams, among others) who devote some time to video, but also examine a much broader vista of multimedia and online journalism.
Got a favorite site for learning video techniques? Please let us know in the comments.
January 26, 2010 in showcase, Websites
The Daily Campus at Southern Methodist University launched a new design for their web site over winter break. The paper also upgraded to College Publisher 5. Editor Meredith Shamburger says the staff hopes to produce more multimedia and use the redesigned site to develop a web-first mentality.
If your student media outlet web site has undergone a facelift recently, drop me an e-mail, or a comment so we can make note of it here.
January 25, 2010 in College Media, College Media News, Websites
The Red and Black at the University of Georgia has switched from College Publisher to a WordPress system, hosted by CoPress. Along with the new CMS, the R&B freshened up their design. Chelsea Cook and Daniel Burnett talked about the switch in this article.
The Chronicle at Quinnipiac University has also moved to WordPress through CoPress.
And the College Heights Herald at Western Kentucky has tweaked their design from Fall ’09. Here’s the earlier version (note the new version has more navigation links above and below the flag):
Break is over: The future of journalism, and some curated links
March 22, 2010 in hope for the future, Links
Then, this weekend, I’ll be assisting with the APME/MPI NewsTrain workshop in Arlington Heights, Ill. (details here) The faculty is pretty impressive. Mark Briggs will be there, as will Derek Willis, whom I’ve interviewed, but never met in person. I hope to have some short videos available from that workshop as well.
Meanwhile, here are some random links to start the day off right.
Read the rest of this entry →
Tags: career talk, college newspapers, comments, Flash Journalism, jay rosen, Links, NC State Technician, steve buttry, Twitter
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