Tag: web

NextNewsroom – Innovation for college media

Facilitated by Kathleen Sullivan

Notes from the board

What changes need to be made

  • Different deadline reality
  • Different sources for content
  • Story doesn’t end when it goes to print (continue the discussion)

Assets and obstacles to adaptation

  • What can be delegated and what can’t (address workload)
  • Assign a team to a long running story
  • Build an in-house wiki (not starting from scratch each year)
  • Territorial attitudes towards space
  • Interdisciplinary staff, not just “journalism” major or the equivalent
  • Think about the mark they leave, legacy
  • Workload, time management: Go for low-hanging fruit, make things doable
  • Competition (either with other student people or local publications)

UT Arlington: once a week in print, five times a week online

NextNewsroom – How to change from the old to the new

Facilitated by John North, Knoxville News Sentinel

What is the new world?
“It’s publishing now, we don’t wait.”

On the board

Old World:

  • Print tomorrow or
  • Print whenever

New World: Web, e-mail, text

  • Publish now
  • Publish now
  • Publish now
  • Publish now
  • Print tomorrow

You [should] begin to work a story throughout the day. Start with a a few graphs early on and evolve the story slowly — not a 15- to 20-inch update each time.

“We’re talking about quick hits and things you can get up quickly.”

Then, you can reach into that system and put it into the newspaper.

“For us, it’s really been, ‘Wow, you can do this?’ ”

Shannon Morgan, editor in chief, The Arbiter, Boise State

  • “My focus to tell the stories in as many dimensions as we can.”
  • You also have to make sure the various elements are different.
  • People thought, “Oh, she’s just that multimedia girl — she doesn’t know journalism.”

Megan Taylor, managing editor for online, The Independent Florida Alligator

  • She recently wrote a story for the front page and people were surprised she could write.
  • Regarding having staff do new media: “You can’t just tell them what they have to do, you just have to do it.”

North

“Universities are on the radar nationwide now. You guys can do amazing things. If you guys feel limited, you’re not; there are no barriers.” Wait until you get to the paid world to see limits.

For new media: “If you set that expectation, you will get the result you want. … Once you start that little bit of synergy, it tends to begin to grow itself.” It’s not so difficult to push through that wall to find success.

Promotion/marketing:
Examples include promos, Web refers, etc.

“Sometimes you just have to be creative and think outside of the box.”

SPJ region 3 conference update

COLUMBIA, S.C. — It’s day two here at the SPJ region 3 convention at the University of South Carolina.

Yesterday was great. New people, new ideas. I attended the following sessions:

  • New Media Challenges: I learned a lot more about managing online communities.
  • Preparing for Tomorrow’s Newsroom: A very original and insightful presentation by Joe Grimm.
  • Freelancing for the New Media Age: There was basically no mention of new media, but the freelancing tips were good.
  • Reception: Chatted with students and others while eating chicken and brownie and sipping sweet, sweet iced tea.

I was unable to liveblog the events yesterday afternoon because there is no guest access to USC’s wireless network. I took notes and post summaries of the events when time allows.

What’s on deck today:

  • One-man Banding
  • Mark of Excellence luncheon
  • Reporting by the Numbers
  • The Changing Political Landscape

Then we fly back to Miami tonight and it’s deadline tomorrow!

The CMSes they are a-changin’

Using a blogging platform for a Web site?

Yes.

After first planning to use Drupal, we’ve decided that it is no longer the best option for TheMiamiHurricane.com‘s new content management system.

So, (drumroll), we’ve decided to go with WordPress.

Why? In short, it is the better overall, long-term option. More reasons/details to come in a future post.

I’d like to thank Sean Blanda from Temple University. Sean’s insights and advice — via his blog, a session at the CMA conference in NYC that our news editor and adviser attended and an e-mail response to visuals editor Will Wooten — helped us feel more confident in our final decision.

Some background: I started reading Sean’s blog during spring break, particularly intrigued with the posts about the Temple News‘ experience with WordPress. Ironically, a day or two after reading some old posts, Will e-mailed me and brought up the idea of using WP after doing his own separate research.

Besides Temple, the Sagebrush at University of Nevada Reno also uses WordPress.

Advice for bloggers, part one: Reader stats

I started blogging in November to discuss online journalism, journalism education and other related topics.

Since mid-January, I’ve also been using the blog to fulfill an online journalism class requirement because everyone in class is required to maintain a blog.

Professor Sam Terilli, who spoke to my class Thursday about law and the Internet (see related video), brought up a point that one of my classmates, Josh Newman, mentioned on his blog Friday:

“[Terilli asked] the question that, I think, made most of my classmates (including myself, excluding Greg Linch) squirm a little. ‘How many people read your blogs?’ …Silence.”

Josh goes on to mention Google Analytics. This is a great service, but it’s only one way to measure how many readers you have.

I subscribe to all of my classmates’ blogs via Google Reader and would recommend that they utilize FeedBurner, an earlier suggestion (How to…use FeedBurner) that the class has been using, to keep track of their subscribers.

FeedBurner is great for adding an e-mail subscription widget, something our professor required, but that should only be a preliminary step.

Explore the different tabs in FeedBurner, specifically “Publicize” and “Analyze” — the latter of which shows you how many RSS subscribers you have. The number of subscribers is also available on the “My Feeds” page.

There’s a lot that can be said about the question of increasing blog traffic and readers, so I decided to divide my thoughts into shorter posts.

Stay tuned…

UPDATE, March 23: I clarified above that not all journalism students are required to blog — only the ones in the CNJ 442 Online Journalism class.

Other School of Communication students have their on personal blogs and may blog through the SoC’s Web site.

Also, I should have mentioned SiteMeter as another option for blog/site analytics.