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College Media Has Come A Long Way Online

Tyler Knowlton — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:30:23 +0000

by Bryan Murley, November 19, 2008

With the swift pace of change in the media landscape, it’s easy to overlook how far college news media has come in a short time. There has been some great innovation in college media, even as some lag behind.

I was prompted to reflect on this last month, after reading Going Digital, an Inside Higher Ed article by Brian Farkas, editor of the Vassar Miscellany News.

Farkas writes:

With our new Web site, http://miscellanynews.com/, we have now entered into the next generation of online journalism. And, for better or worse, we have become one of the few colleges in the country to do so. On our new site, reporters can contribute live blogs, attach videos and other multimedia to their articles, and display high-resolution photography in a way that our print publication never could. Best of all, The Miscellany’s site is flexible, no longer burdened with the stagnant design so common among news sites in the 1990s. We have become one of only a handful of college newspapers in the country, along with The Yale Daily News and The Swarthmore Phoenix, to adopt a Web 2.0 approach and craft our site using up-to-date CSS and XML standards.

Farkas’ description is overly pessimistic. Despite his negative outlook, college newspapers across the country are still moving forward with online content. Their innovations have been visible over the past few years — especially when you consider how difficult it is for them to change.

Resistance to Change

When I first began blogging about online college media three years ago, most websites were little more than shovelware, with print editors and some advisers reluctant to invest time and energy in developing a robust web presence.

Some of that resistance was based in tradition: It’s hard to steer a 100-year-old institution in a new direction. Production workflows had developed and been set like clockwork. Each new generation of editors and reporters walked in the footsteps of the previous generation, and learned their ways. The website was appended to the end of the workflow, after pages were sent to the press. Blowing up that workflow is not easy.

Still more resistance was cultural. Print journalists saw themselves as newspaper journalists first. The battles over whether blogging could be journalism were still being fought. Copy editor Greg Finley of the Orion at California State-Chico argued in 2006 that newspapers should keep their content offline, saying “No other medium can match newspapers’ depth.”

And another hurdle was technological: Inexpensive, easy-to-use tools for online storytelling were just coming into widespread use, and broadband Internet access was not nearly as widespread as it is today.

That resistance has faded over time, especially as the news industry has struggled to reinvent itself.

But that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. Even now, I find community college newspapers that still have no web presence. Bob Bergland, a professor at Missouri Western State University, found that 36% of a random sample of college newspapers had no web presence at all. (Bergland’s findings are not yet available online, but I’ll update this post as soon as they are available.)

Large daily university papers struggle to make money from their websites, and campus readership of the printed product remains high compared to industry standards, which leads to a conundrum: whether to devote resources to a website when the print product is still so popular.

And online efforts ebb and flow with staff changes as student journalists graduate and new ones take their place. One year, a paper hires a whiz-bang web designer who beefs up their online offerings. The next year, that designer is gone, and a less-savvy replacement can’t keep up the pace. One year’s multimedia journalist gives way to the next year’s more traditional print journalist.

Blazing New Trails

Despite all these obstacles, many college newspapers have moved forward with innovative online offerings. Here are a few examples of sites that have paved the way in blogging, video, audio slideshows, and other forms of interactivity:

Xpress Flash-based map of campus

San Francisco State University Xpress — Former SFSU journalism professor Andrew DeVigal, now multimedia editor for the New York Times, helped lead the Xpress staff in producing a multimedia-rich web site using Movable Type blogging software. Flash-based maps and audio slideshows (like this package that illustrates favorite student hangouts at SFSU) began on the Xpress site in 2006.

Vanderbilt University InsideVandy — Chris Carroll, Vanderbilt student media adviser and co-founder of the Center for Innovation in College Media, led InsideVandy student journalists in an effort to create a “mothership” approach to student media, akin to Steve Yelvington’s BlufftonToday in 2006. The idea was to bring all student media — TV, radio, newspaper, and magazines — into one online presence that would allow anyone in the community to contribute content.

Virginia Tech Collegiate Times — The Collegiate Times became an example of both breaking news and multimedia usage in the aftermath of the April 16, 2007, massacre on campus. Student journalists posted breaking news updates, a blog, audio slideshows and video (see the CT archives here). More than that, other school newspapers also used online media to report on the shootings, posting video reports from their campuses and posting blog updates from Virginia (see continuing ICM coverage here).

University of Washington Daily — Just days before the VT shootings, UW’s student journalists covered the death of a student on campus, using video and live updates to tell the story (archived story here). The Daily began shooting video news on campus in the 2006-07 school year.

Spartan Daily slideshow for a boxing story

San Jose State University Spartan Daily — With Ryan Sholin as web editor, the Spartan Daily plunged into multimedia early. See this example, a 2006 story about SJSU boxing club members traveling to Berkeley to compete in a regional boxing tournament. In addition to text, the article features video and audio slideshows. The paper has continued to push the envelope, in March 2008 experimenting with live streaming TV and live blogging.

Boise State University Arbiter — The Arbiter dove headfirst into web-first publishing when the Broncos went to the Fiesta Bowl in 2006. Since the Arbiter wasn’t publishing during the Christmas break, they made the most of their online presence. Staffers from the student newspaper published web-only content from Arizona, including podcasts, video and audio slideshows (see their coverage here). They have continued to produce podcasts and other multimedia coverage since then.

Eastern Illinois University Daily Eastern News — Long before I was hired at Eastern, the DEN was producing audio slideshows using Soundslides that rivaled the best in the business. Check out this audio slideshow from the 2006 Greek Week Tugs competition. They were also early to experiment with podcasts and, in 2006, revamped their sports coverage by introducing a widget that could automatically update football scores and schedule information for readers.

This is just a small sampling of the ways that students have taken advantage of online tools since late 2005. There are numerous other schools that have also moved into multimedia and online publishing with gusto, including the Daily Tar Heel at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Daily Collegian at Penn State, the Daily Pennsylvanian at Penn, the GW Hatchet at George Washington U., the Miami Hurricane, the Independent Florida Alligator at the University of Florida, the Corsair at Pensacola Junior College, the Gargoyle at Flagler College, the Daily Mississippian at Ole Miss, and numerous others. For more examples of student journalists’ multimedia, see this database.

Recently, we saw clear evidence of this movement into online journalism on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, when student journalists across the country used tools like Mogulus, Twitter and CoverItLive to cover the historic election night. (For a sampling of coverage, see here).

To borrow a phrase, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Bryan Murley is assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University, where he advises DENnews.com, the online site for the student newspaper. He is also the director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, where he leads the weblog Innovation in College Media. He is the college media correspondent for MediaShift.

Alana Taylor VS Heritage Media

Tyler Knowlton — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:46:15 +0000

Via Mashable

October 1, 2008 – 9:30 pm PDT – by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins

The buzz has more or less died down, at least in the pages ofGawker, MediaShift, TechDirt and Romenesko. But our very ownAlana Taylor did a feature for PBS blog MediaShift, a commentary really, on the lack of New Media savvy amongst the students and faculty at NYU in a class called “Reporting Gen Y.”

She did so by mainly remarking on the irony that in a class full of journalism students, she was the only one to have ever posted to a blog before, let alone heard of Twitter, FriendFeed, or any other microblogging utility. After she posted her observations on this, the Professor for the class banned any unauthorized blogging of the class.

Romenesko, in his trademark succinct manner, summarizes the hubbub the best:

“Every single journalism class at NYU has required me to bring the bulky newspaper,” writes AlanaTaylor. “I don’t understand why they don’t let us access the online version, get our current events news from other outlets, or even use our NYTimes app on the iPhone. Bringing the New York Times pains me because I refuse to believe that it’s the only source for credible news or Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism and it’s a big waste of trees.”

Alana Taylor says after writing about her “Reporting Gen Y” class at NYU, instructor Mary Quigley told her not to blog, Twitter or write about the class again. (Quigley tells Mark Glaser: “I would certainly require a student to ask permission to use direct quotes from the class on a blog written after class.”) Glaser writes: “As a private school, NYU might be able to restrict a student’s reporting on what went on in a classroom — but that would go against everything that journalism schools are teaching students about the First Amendment and freedom of the press.”

Michael Getler has “serious problems” with the “undercover” piece by journalism student Alana Taylor (left), which was published on PBS’s website. Journalism is going to evolve, the ombud writes, but “it seems to me that certain fundamentals must remain bedrock. Among them is the notion that journalists must always, except in the most rare circumstances, announce themselves, go through the front door, say who you are, what you are doing and who you are working for.”

As often happens in these sort of defining process story events, they can very easily turn into fodder for not just commentary but learning. Alana has told me that a number of professors around the country have said that they’re making Alana’s original piece and the controversy it stirred a part of their curriculum for journalism ethics and New Media-related courses.

Given that, I took a few minutes over the weekend to talk to Alana and get her side of the story. I know from personal experience when a seemingly innocuous article spins far outside the context in which it was originally written. Last August, I wrote a short little piece regarding confirmations I received for the existence of the gPhone, and the five or six sentences of analysis and information I wrote were duplicated, cited, and spun eight ways to Sunday for the following two or three months until Google made an official announcement.

Similarly, a lot of critical words were written with regard to what Alana wrote, including the words of MediaShift Ombudsman Michael Getler, and according to Alana none of those who wrote highly critical words contacted her for a full accounting. We’ll set aside the irony of Heritage Media vanguards railing against the lack of best practices in New Media while ignoring the most basic of rules they claim to espouse.

Instead, I wanted to focus on some of the more interesting things Alana and I talked about. I commented to her how silly I thought it was to create a policy in today’s society that said “you can’t blog about this class.” To me, that’s tantamount to censorship, something that the professor has no right to do. It would be similar to the manager at the local corner store telling me I can shop there, but not tweet to anyone about my experiences at the store. It’s senseless and outside their jurisdiction.

She concurred, despite the fact it was her intention to simply show the power of New Media.

“A lot of the points I made in my article that were actually re-enforced through all the blogosphere buzz,” she said. “My point was precisely that blogging is powerful and social media should be used for what it is – the newest platform of communication. It should be taught to the kids who will have to use it in the next ten years.”

And despite all the heritage media posturing and smug self-importance, she indeed proved her point. By simply putting her story out there, through the rapid conduits of New Media, her article got attention and further established her name in the world of journalism, landing her letters of congratulations and job offers from editors, publications, and news anchors.

That of course didn’t stop many of her detractors from writing furious letters to the editors as to how insignificant and trivial blogging and New Media journalism was. This led both of us to the question: if nobody takes blogging seriously, then why are they so furious? It’s a good one, and its answer is probably rooted in the same place that irrational and desperate actions from pop stars of ten years ago are when they sue toddlers for dancing to their music on the Internet.

Beyond that, I was awestruck that NYU, an educational institution renowned for its journalism school, was barely ahead of the community college where I started my journalism education ten years ago. Back then, social media wasn’t a powerful thing (or even a term), but my journalism classes for the first two semesters consisted of being taught the intricacies of the Mac Color Classic as a “twentieth century publishing tool.”

If this is the cutting edge of media education, then our educational system is in trouble. When you look around at the nature of the professional blogosphere, is it any wonder that a minority of them come from classically trained journalism backgrounds?

There are a wide variety of conclusions to draw from the whole debacle, but the one which sticks out most to me, I think, is that our approach to social media in the mainstream in general and education in specificity needs to become a lot more advanced. This technology isn’t going away, and if we continue to let academia pretend like it doesn’t exist, then we’ll end up robbing our society as a whole of what has been the historical basis for much of our country’s innovation and advancement.

In short, institutions for higher learning will simply become obsolete.

Content is a Commodity and Needs No Bailout

Tyler — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:15:58 +0000

Via Mashable

September 23, 2008 – 12:28 am PDT – by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins 6 Comments

It’s rare that I find a short article with so many things wrong with it as I did this evening. As per usual, after I put out an editorial on a topic I tend to get IMs and emails from my friends with article suggestions along the same lines, and Steven sent along a short exposition by Tom Foremski over at Silicon Valley Watcher penned earlier today.

It starts with a factoid that the entire US newspaper business is valued at $20 billion, and notes that Sergey Brin and Larry Page are worth about $16 billion each as individuals; Tom’s post cites the source of the fact as Valleywag (even though the fact at Valleywag is attributed to Wall Street Estimates). If this were the end of and totality of the inaccuracies, I’d take no note of it at all, but that’s far from the case.

Here’s the point by point:

“US newspapers didn’t realize GOOG is a media company until it was too late.”

It took me literally thirty seconds to pull up an article from 2003 with the quote: “Surely the buy-up of Blogger is another step towards Google becoming a fully-fledged media company.” We’ve been talking about this very topic for at least half a decade, and none of the news wires or newspapers having their content syndicated have been particularly thrilled about the prospect for quite a while.

Newspapers Worldwide (Minus U.S.) Oppose Google-Yahoo Deal

Tyler — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:06:55 +0000

Via the New York Times

By Miguel Helft

In the early hours of Monday morning, the World Association of Newspapers posted a lengthy communique on its Web site calling the Google-Yahoo advertising partnership anti-competitive and urging regulators to block the deal. According to its Web site, the World Association of Newspapers represents 76 national newspaper associations and more than 18,000 publications in five continents. Its communique led to flurry of headlines that essentially said “Newspapers Around World Oppose Yahoo-Google Ad Deal.”

But hours later, the U.S.-based Newspaper Association of America, a member of the World Association of Newspapers, issued a communique of its own (they called it a press release). In it, John F. Sturm, president of the association said: “While NAA is a member of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), I would like to clarify that the NAA Board of Directors has taken no position on the proposed advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo.” The association represents more than 2000 newspapers in the United States and Canada. Its members account for 90 percent of the daily circulation of newspapers in the United States.

WSJ’s Emo Social Network Not a Bad Idea

Tyler — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:18:34 +0000

Via Mashable

September 17, 2008 – 3:04 am PDT – by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins 1 Comment

The Wall Street Journal rolled out their long awaited new look over the weekend, and I actually had a chance to take a look at it yesterday due to all the AIG/Lehman brothers mess as I tried to get a handle on how many stomach ulcers I should develop this week. What’s interesting, aside from the design itself, is that they’ve implemented community and social networking features that are almost completely unique to the web we all know and love; the WSJ socnet is (like much of the featured content) behind a paywall.

PaidContent called the new look “dark and brooding,” but I think it’s just the newspaper being overly emo and dramatic amidst some particularly depressing economic news-cycles.

Does ‘Web First’ Strategy Make Sense for Small Newspapers?

Tyler — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:30:53 +0000

Via MediaShift

by Mark Van Patten, 2:18PM

Mark Van Patten

The Bowling Green Daily News doesn’t have a “web first” strategy in the way we run our newspaper. That means that we don’t post articles to our website before they appear in print. Apart from some breaking local news, most major stories don’t appear on the Internet until after the press is running.

Right now, our readers aren’t particularly Internet savvy. Many still use dial-up for Internet access. They generally only check their email a couple times a week. They don’t know much about what’s available online. They still depend heavily on the printed paper for their news.

But that’s not going to stay the case for long. When our readers discover the Internet, and the myriad websites that have local information, they will start migrating from print to online. If readers are going to trust a newspaper, it has to be first with news more often than any competitor. So if we are going to keep readers in an online world, they have to know that when an important story breaks, they can quickly find coverage on our website.

New WSJ.com Builds on Its Community of Subscribers

Tyler — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:53:09 +0000

Via the New York Times

By Vindu Goel

The venerable Wall Street Journal will activate a revamped version of its Web site, WSJ.com, early Tuesday morning.

The new site isn’t a lot different from the old one, based on screenshots and other details Journal executives shared with me last week. It has a cleaner, more inviting look, thanks to fewer ads and the elimination of the navigation buttons on the left side of the home page. Unchanged is the most important aspect of the current site: the wall that blocks non-subscribers from reading most of The Journal’s business news articles.

The new WSJ.com sports new community features.
Enlarge This Image

However, one aspect of the redesign is radical, and if it’s successful, it could provide lessons for other news organizations trying to build deeper connections with their readers: New community features will allow WSJ.com’s million or so paid online subscribers to comment on every story, pose their own discussion questions, e-mail each other and set up profiles that will allow others to see what they’re doing on the site.

In other words, WSJ.com will offer a social network for business professionals, built around the content of the newspaper and Web site but not limited to it. It’s what the Journal’s advertising side likes to call “a clean, well-lit place” where its readers can talk with like-minded souls about everything from the Lehman meltdown to the best business-class hotels in Shanghai.

Is Mainstream Media Really Ready to Get Social?

Tyler — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:03:41 +0000

Via Mashable

by Steven Hodson 10 Comments

There has been a lot written over the past year or so about how the time is coming when social media tools like Twitter will become not just the toys of the early adopters of the tech blogosphere, but break through and become a fixture of the mainstream media. With its scaling problems seemingly behind it, Twitter may finally be ready to cross that line between the techies and the rest of the Web using world.

This was especially apparent during Hurricane Gustav’s visit to the Gulf Coast and the reporting being done by CNN’s Rick Sanchez; who apparently discovered Twitter for the first time and made it an integral part of his reporting. This has gone over so well that CNN will be having a show on the weekends with Rick built around Twitter; called appropriately enough – Rick Sanchez Direct.

On the other hand, Rick’s fellow anchor Anderson Cooper; who was actually on Twitter before Rick, seems to be using it only as a way to funnel out headlines. Rick Sanchez’s involvement has been full tilt to the point that he and his producer had to get Twitter to lift the following limits for his account. In contrast Anderson is following seven people.

This isn’t the only time that the Twitterverse has seen famous people in media – both old and new – who have signed up and then proceeded to only broadcast what they were doing but then don’t follow enough people to be able to use it as a way to have conversations. There is no denying that Twitter is making some really deep inroads into mainstream media, but is that media really grasping the principal behind things like Twitter? For every person like Rick Sanchez there are a growing number that are like Anderson Cooper; and those two men are from the same news organization.

Start-Up Attacks Media Bias, One Phrase at a Time

Tyler — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:16:15 +0000

Via the New York Times

By Claire Cain Miller

SpinSpotter, a new start-up, could send shivers across many a newsroom. The Web tool, which went live Monday at the DEMO technology conference in San Diego, scans news stories for signs of spin.

Users download Spinoculars, a toolbar that sits atop the browser and lets readers know if the story they are reading has any phrases or words that indicate bias. (It works only in Firefox now and will work in Internet Explorer in a couple weeks.) It highlights those phrases in a big red box, and readers can click to find out what exactly SpinSpotter found wrong with the phrase.

SpinSpotter founder and chief creative officer, Todd Herman, put it a different way: “Our mission is to make news media transparent.”

Blogger Conditions Worsen as Many Defend Palin Pick

Tyler — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:11:03 +0000

Via Mediashift

by Laura Hertzfeld, 2:35PM

Laura Hertzfeld

Shame on us, the media, for thinking the Republican National Convention would pale in comparison to the Democrats’ show in Denver last week. For bloggers on both sides of the aisle here in St. Paul, what the RNC has lacked in strawberry-lemonade smoothies, it has more than made up for with juicy stories.

While Hurricane Gustav may have stopped the convention activities on Monday, it didn’t put a halt to the protests — more than 15,000 strong by most counts — that filled downtown St. Paul and continued in fits and starts throughout the week. The biggest bump for bloggers came from TheUptake.com, whose bloggers used Qik video streaming technology to broadcast live, while wearing shirts saying “I Am The Media.”

Riot police and protesters at the RNC

Inside the Xcel Energy Center, Internet video is still treated as something most attendees aren’t all that comfortable with. At the YouTube booth, set up so delegates could share their thoughts on the RNC directly with the YouChoose08 channel, there have been fewer videos submitted than at a similar setup in Denver. People working the booth said they are seeing some interest, but that there are about 60 to 70 videos coming in each night, compared with more than 100 at the DNC.