Observations of college newspaper websites

I checked out websites of three college newspapers for ideas that I can borrow. The three newspapers are Mustang Daily at California Polytechnic State University, The Daily Illini at University of Illinois, and The Whit at Rowan University. The reason I chose these three papers is that they recently launched or revamped their websites. The purpose for a new/revamped website, as is said by the editor-in-chief of The Daily Illini, is ”about staying ahead of the curve, trying and exploring new technologies and, most importantly, building a site that allows our readers the most enlightening experience possible.”

So, how do these new/revamped sites serve the new tasks of college newspaper? Here’s some observations of the common features found on the three sites. To better illustrate the “new” features of these sites, I am using a “conventional” college newspaper site, The Quadrangle at Manhattan College, as a comparison. The Quadrangle is typical of a large number of college newspaper websites that are part of the College Media Network; all the newspaper sites in the College Media Network are based on the same platform/template/hosting service by College Publisher.

Contents: The major sections of the three “new” sites, as is shown in the main navigation of the sites, usually include typical sections of the print versions; i.e., News, Features, Sports, Arts & Entertainment, Opinion. The two sections that are found in the main navigation of all the three site, but not on The Quadrangle, are Multimedia and Blog. 

Functions: The above-mentioned editor-in-chief of The Daily Illini said of the new features of their new site, in comparison with the old site, this way: ”stories can be supplemented with Google maps, related audio, links to forums and informative breakouts, just to name a few. Additionally, stories are tagged with key words to help you find information on similar topics, and there are helpful links on both the right-hand side and within the story to related content.” Depending on the nature of the stories, this is true for some articles on all three sites. In comparison, on the site of The Quadrangle,  attaching a photo to the story is as far as they could go.

Design: with a quick look at the three “new” sites and the Quadrangle site, one can easily see the difference in the look and feel. The Quandrangle looks more like a legacy of the print world: blocks of text with occasional photos; in comparison, the three “new” sites all prominently feature more visual elements such as photos and videos.

I will write a seperate post for a more detailed investigation of the new elements found on the three “new” sites. So stay tuned…

Skills a multimedia journalist needs

A blog post I came across has a list of skills needed for a multimedia journalist; this list is based on the author’s talks with professionals from major media outlets at a job fair last year:

• Excellent writing skills (emphasized by everyone)
• Proficiency in multimedia platforms – i.e. video & audio
• Proficiency in multimedia tools – Flash, InDesign, Photoshop, Dreamweaver
• And “flexibility, confidence, adaptability and versatility – as in, at a moment’s notice, a print person might be on camera.”
• “real world experience” and the importance of being bi- or multi-lingual.

New curriculum for a new century?

The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at University of North Carolina will adopt a new curriculum beginning fall 2009. The news release says “the new curriculum takes into account significant changes in the industry, including the move toward increased use of a wider variety of channels to communicate to important publics and stakeholders.”

What’s noteworthy about UNC’s new journalism curriculum is that they are requiring all journalism majors to take a video-audio production class, and they are doing away with the traditional concentrations such as print vs. broadcast or journalism vs. radio/TV, instead, there will be five new tracks:

• Editing and Graphic Design
• Electronic Communication
• Multimedia
• Photojournalism
• Reporting

These five tracks pretty much cover the needs of a future digital newsroom. However, there’s still the issue of specialist vs. generalist: do we want our students to be a specialist in one track, or do they need to be a generalist in multiple tracks? The answer to this concern will largely depend on the evolvement of the newsroom; we need to see whether the future journalist jobs require one journalist taking on multiple tasks, or if team reporting/production will be the norm.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer to go web-only

On March 17, 2009, the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer will cease publishing its print version and will continue to live online with a much smaller staff. This makes Seattle P-I the largest daily newspaper in U.S. to shift to an entirely digital news product. An article about this sad closure can be found on the website of Seattle P-I.

What prompted me to write something about this unfortunate yet unavoidable closure is not how the old journalism business model is dying, it’s more about how the digital-only Seattle P-I will survive and live on, as digital journalism is still something emerging and being experimented with and, thus far, has been treated as a supplement or, an extension, of the print version.

According to the above-mentioned article, the digital Seattle P-I will be a “community platform” which “will feature breaking news, columns from prominent Seattle residents, community databases, photo galleries, 150 citizen bloggers and links to other journalistic outlets.” This is pretty much a synopsis of what online news can offer: immediacy, interactivity, multimedia, and citizen journalism. It’s just that this has not yet proved to be a sustainable or, profitable, business model.

We’ll say farewell to the outgoing print Seattle P-I and good-luck to the incoming new seattlepi.com.

An example on good online news writing

A recent article carried by  Evansville Courier & Press on a new assisted-living home caught my eyes as a good example of online writing:

1. Be succinct. Remove any or at least, unessential, adjectives and adverbs; keep the subject-verb-object sentence structure. Use short paragraphs, one idea per paragraph. NOTE that I do not necessarily recommend one-sentence-per-paragraph style as seen in this article though.

2. Separate the background information from the story copy. In this article, the ”facts about the old” assisted-living home is contained in a sidebar and, as a common online writing practice, presented in a bulleted list.

3. The inverted-pyramid style in print writing still holds true in the online copies, if not all the more important. The reason is simple: online readers are even more impatient than print readers.

4. A less obvious point about this article and, online news copies in general, is to be specific in the headlines. The headline is where search engines like Google look at when an online user is searching for relevant information. This article has a headline of “New assisted-living home will be built on Knights of Columbus property.” A specific headline, like this one, is more likely to be presented to people googling for information about “assisted-living home” or “Knights of Columbus.” In contrary, a more print-like headline, such as ” A New Destiny for an Old Landmark,” is less likely to reach people interested in the information we just mentioned.

5. The writing of this article still have room for improvement though. The text copy is a bit long: it’s four pages down, on my 1280*800 display, to the end of the article. To better keep the attention of readers, the writer better use two or three subheadings in the copy. Be aware that subheading is also a typical online writing tip.

University of North Florida library

A photo I took of UNF library.

Jacksonville beach

A photo taken at Jacksonville beach; I worked in Jacksonville for four years.

What to expect of j-students: specialist or generalist?

Multimedia journalism education is being implemented at different colleges and universities in different ways; this is no surprise given the fact this is a new area for both the industry and the academia. We cannot have a clear idea how to incorporate multimedia journalism into existing journalism education until this practice further establishes itself in the industry.

That said, a basic question needs to be pondered: do we want our students to be a story specialist and multimedia generalist, or a story generalist and multimedia specialist? Ideally, we want the students to be a specialist in both areas; but that’s not always possible in the curriculum planning.

I tend to believe that a journalism student needs to be a story specialist and a multimedia generalist. The students need, first and foremost, to be well-trained in both print and broadcast journalism; then they take a cluster of multimedia journalism courses.

Whatever the way multimedia journalism is incorporated into the curriculum, this training needs to achieve three basic goals: (a) cultivate a multimedia journalism mindset for the students, (b) expose them to the current practices and examples, and (c) teach them how to use some basic tools.

Get to know Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A recent concept and practice for news reporters, especially news editors, is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The idea is that when a news organization publishes a story online, they want to attract more readers to the story from the online world. One way to draw in more traffic, at no or low cost, is to optimize the searchable data in the online copy. With some well-crafted keywords embedded in the online story, more people will find this story when they search for relevant information.

One example is that if you have an article on women’s fashion and you want to put it online, you need to put some keywords into the meta-title and headline; the meta-title and headlines are what search engines index and search. Then, what keywords to put in the meta-title and headline that are easier to be found by people googling for women’s fashion information? In the print media, people may use “style” as the keyword; however, in the online world, “style” may point to vastly different contexts. “Fashion”, in this example, was proven to generate better results.

In the “tools & resources” page, I have listed two tool offered by Google, free, for people to check for keyword ideas. I also listed some readings on SEO in the “sites of interest” section. Also, on the homepage of WordTracker, at the bottom of the page, there’s some good introductions on SEO. WordTracker is a commercial computer program though.

Medium vs. message?

A student project on how African Americans voted during the Democratic primary between Hilary and Obama makes me ponder the issue of “medium vs. message.” If the message (story) is not suitable for the medium (online presentation), then we need to consider another story for the medium or another approach to the story.

This project is a good application of online journalism techniques, incorporating Flash, video interview snippets, and interativity to show how and why 36 people cast their votes. It’s just that the contents are not engaging enough; out of the 36 interviewees, I watched several and was not intrigued enough to check out more.

Then I thought: what else/more can there be that would further attract me to this project? It seems to me that this project lacks depth, the project just scratches the surface of the issue. Instead of listing out 36 interview clips which all look similar, if not the same, to the audience, the students could’ve interviewed appropriate people or experts for more in-depth analysis, they could also include interactive data about how African American voters vote in primary and general elections.