I detailed our approach here in May. Now it’s time to assess our efforts (and no, I’m not going to assign a letter grade).

“I feel that we are just on top of everything on campus,” said Lexy Cruz, who served as the first executive editor for student media, overseeing all content across platforms. “It’s almost like we’re just watching the TCU ‘trending topics’ and reporting for students that like up-to-the-minute information and details. I like giving the audience everything we have when we have it.”

Before the move to digital first, Cruz was the editor of the converged website, TCU 360, which hosted content from the TCU Daily Skiff newspaper, “TCU News Now” television broadcast and Image magazine. The site also produced some original content. Each outlet had its own staff and was focused on its own goals.

“The transition to digital first was somewhat difficult at first, regarding the separation from the traditional print style of the Skiff and the habit we’d all been in within student media,” said Taylor Prater, the visuals editor, which was one of four senior leadership positions that oversaw operations under Cruz’s direction. “I believe it was a vital transition.”

Now, aside from Image and our program’s community news website, the109.org, all of the content is produced through what has been dubbed “one big news team” with about 70 student journalists and is focused on content and delivering news digitally – and not based on legacy media needs.

Each content area was organized into a team with a team leader who worked as both an editor and senior reporter.

As part of the evolution the senior leadership positions of news director, sports director, visuals editor and operations manager positions have been consolidated. Prater will be one of three managing editors in the spring, reporting to a new executive editor, Olivia Caridi, who was a team leader in the fall.

“We still have some way to go and some things to smooth out, but we are no longer in our old ways,” Prater said.

The transition to digital first was rapid, organic, surprising and exciting, according to News Director Emily Atteberry.

“In May, hearing that our news organization was considering switching to digital first seemed like an absurd joke – there was no way we could make the switch by August, it was too confusing, too risky, too bizarre,” she said. “It was a lot like the Wild West – there are not quite rules, best practices and standards enacted. The first time we had a big breaking news story or two reporters accidentally assigned the same story, it was a bit of a snag. But we found ways to work through things. Flexibility was key.”

Notably, the University of Oregon’s Daily Emerald and The Red & Black, the University of Georgia’s independent newspaper, have gone digital first the past couple years, among others.

At TCU, the consistently best work, according to the students, has come in coverage of breaking news.

“The biggest success is getting breaking news out quickly, while the story still remains factual and well rounded,” Prater said. “Digital first has given the campus an easier means of getting news quickly, which is essential in the growing digital age.”

Just since August, the students have covered the arrest of the football team’s starting quarterback for driving while intoxicated (student reporters previously used open records to reveal he had failed a drug test and admitted to using cocaine) and impeachment proceedings for the student government president.

“We were able to break stories faster and more comprehensively than we had ever been able to before,” Atteberry said, “and we followed stories for days, updating content over and over and adding elements as they became available.”

Cruz said the same standards for accuracy and the other best traditions of journalism still apply, but that they simply have to work faster, comparing what her team has done to a hot meal.

“We have a very hungry beast that doesn’t understand why the food has to sit on the counter ready and become cold when he can eat it fresh out of the oven,” Cruz said.

Digital first allows for more up-to-date, more engaging news coverage, but the move did require a change in mindset.

“We were now being given deadlines within a few hours after an event or news break,” said Luis Ortiz, the “New Now” news director. “It took some getting used to, but I feel like it was worth it and we acquired some new skills.”

Maybe the biggest challenge was figuring out how to impose those deadlines in a digital first environment. The traditional broadcast and print, in particular, deadlines were no longer a focus, but that meant some stories either got lost in the shuffle or were not pushed through because there was no hard deadline like before.

“It was hard figuring out deadlines,” Cruz said. “I always questioned how long it would take to write and copy edit a story and even then I would consider how late the event ended.”

Advisors and professors have discussed what the deadline for event-based stories should be. Thirty minutes? An hour? Two hours? Longer? Shorter? When it’s ready? What about if there’s a live blog?

“I would like to see changes in the turnaround of event stories,” Prater said. “They should be posted within a few hours after the end of the events.”

It’s likely students will be encouraged (perhaps as part of the grade for stories done as part of classes) to file within an hour or two at the latest. Sports game stories already have the expectation of an initial story when the game ends with updates after post-game player and coach interviews.

Prater said she’d like to see more accountability for reporters on deadline and more reporters taking their own photos.

There was also the challenge of putting out a paper four days a week, as well as a weekly broadcast.

“Because we were dependent on 360′s editors to approve content, we had to be very flexible with our budget and had to always have a back-up plan,” said Skiff editor Sarah Greufe.

The Skiff editor and “News Now” news director positions changed dramatically this semester. In the past, both led newsgathering efforts for their respective outlets and had the autonomy to cover what they wished and assign stories based on their production schedules.

“The things that were reported through (the paper and broadcast) were ‘old,’” Ortiz said. “It was very hard to do the newspaper and even the broadcast aspects because much of the content that would come through there was ‘old’ news because it had already been online for a day or two.”

Greufe said the digital first transition had a big impact on how she had to produce the paper.

“We went in with the expectation that stories would be published in a more timely means than they had formerly been in the paper,” Greufe said. “What ended up happening was content would get stuck at some part of the editing process or back at the reporters making it too old for even the paper to publish.”

For Atteberry, who was originally hired as the Skiff editor before taking the news director job and who has written about the transition for USA Today, student media will not truly be digital first until the print scheduled is reduced form four days a week to bi-weekly or weekly.

“Because our paper is still a daily publication, there are still pressures to fill the pages, avoid wire and meet their 9 p.m. print deadline,” Atteberry said. “When we’re breaking a story or covering late events, we still feel traditional print pressure to get it into the paper, which is not necessarily digital-first.”

The efforts of these students are similar to the transition occurring in many professional newsrooms.

“I don’t think we have as many challenges as professionals because students are generally at the edge of technology and social media,” Ortiz said. “The only challenge I feel student news organizations could encounter would be the same as that of professionals, and that’s getting used to producing work quickly and accurately.”

Atteberry, counterintuitively, said there is a disconnect between what she has been taught in school and what has been her experience as an intern.

“I had been taught that I needed to take my laptop to event coverage, live-tweet it, write the story during the event, and have it ready to go 15 minutes after it commenced,” Atteberry said. “When I worked at a daily community paper this past summer, they actually worried that I wrote too quickly even if I took 2 hours to write something up. Digital-first is not yet a strongly developed concept or priority at most community papers.

“If student journalists are passionate about digital first, they will be faced with the challenge of coaxing their employers into the shift or finding a news organization that has embraced the new model.”

Of course, for now, students also have to juggle another challenge: classes that can get in the way of producing journalism.

“Being truly ‘digital-first’ is a struggle for student media because our reporters and editors are also taking a full load of classes and are still learning their positions,” Greufe said.

“Our only issue is that students can’t devote 100 percent of their time to their stories, because of things like classes and grades, which is understandable as a student,” Prater said. “Sometimes that means the turnaround takes a little longer, whereas I’m sure professionals are able to get it all done at once.”

There is, after all, a lot to do – and do quickly.

By the time what we now call legacy media was able to present the news it was inherently old.

Times, of course, have changed. News organizations have to change, too.

That’s the basic idea behind why at TCU’s Schieffer School of Journalism, where I work, we’re going digital first with our student media and realigning our structure to allow us to make that happen. We’ve been converging our student media operations over the past few years and this is the next logical — and perhaps most important — step.

We have a four-day-a-week newspaper, the TCU Daily Skiff, a weekly television newscast, “TCU News Now” (which also produces daily updates), Image magazine and our one-year-old converged website, TCU 360.

Since 2009, our student media have moved into a new converged newsroom, began holding joint budget meetings, moved to a single website and switched the copy desk from the newspaper copy desk to copy editing for all of student media. That was just the start.

Now, the separate news organizations are being reorganized into a single news gathering force that will focus on digital and then use the content that is produced to serve the legacy outlets. There is a caveat. Because of its much different cycle, Image will remain largely independent initially. As will the109.org, a community news website that our program also runs.

Rather than centering the newsgathering on a particular media platform, the goal will be to have reporters produce content in real time and digitally. It’s not a revolutionary idea, but it’s one that has to be embraced and sooner, not later.

In our setup, a student general manager will oversee all of student media. Working with that top leader will be a group of journalists focused mostly on content – news, sports and visuals, plus an operations manager to make sure the content gets where it needs to go.

The news group, in particular, will be broken into several teams, or small groups of reporters and a team leader/senior reporter who will focus on beats to come up with and produce stories. Teams could include administration, campus life, Greek life and academics.

Under the operations group will be an engagement person working with social media and a copy desk that will edit stories and post them online, in addition to production specialists who will make sure the paper and broadcast are prepared.

One manifestation of this digital focus could be live coverage of a campus event that takes tweets and relies on an editor – like the rewrite desk of old – to produce that content for print publication.

Steve Buttry, who works for the aptly named Digital First Media and is an alumnus of TCU, helped consult with us – cementing the ideas many of us have had for some time.

The biggest difference from Buttry’s recommendations and what we are doing is that, for now, we’re not reducing the publication or broadcast schedule. Many of us agreed with Buttry. We’d like to go further, but the decision was there simply wasn’t enough time to make such a drastic change on such relative short notice. A university committee governs our student media and the committee hires leaders for each traditional media outlet, according to the student media by-laws. There are also concerns of how advertisers would react.

Digital first is something you’ve likely heard quite a bit about in the past few days. The New Orleans Times-Picayune announced last week that it’s moving to a digital focus and reducing its daily print schedule to three days a week.

The University of Oregon’s Daily Emerald also announced last week that it’s reducing its print schedule to focus on digital, among many ambitious and exciting initiatives.

The Red & Black, the University of Georgia’s independent newspaper, reduced its print schedule to weekly to refocus on digital last year.

In some cases, but not all, a reduction in the print schedule is fueled by a desire to save money.

At a university, particularly one where student media is partly subsidized through an operating budget, we have the luxury that that is not the case.

We get to do this for the right reasons — that it’s the best way to prepare our students for the jobs they will have and because it is how people get their news now.

Simply put, digital first provides more up-to-date news in a more engaging way to better serve the public.

No one that I know in this business is anti-newspaper. However, those in touch with reality know changes like this are a necessity. We can’t cling to daily printed sheets of paper forever.

If there are skeptics, and I’m sure there are some, take comfort in the fact that if you are focused digitally the content will inherently be able to still meet the needs of the print or broadcast products. In fact, when done right, more news content should be produced and available for legacy outlets.

What we’ve found in our discussions about moving to digital first is that reducing the production time associated with traditional media allows for more time to be spent on producing journalism – and isn’t that what we’re all about, anyways?

Universities can take the lead. Some are doing that and we should. There is less pressure and fewer risks for us. If we want our students to enter an industry with a future we have to do our part to figure out new ways to provide great journalism.

I’ve shared a lot here. Now for the most important part: What are your suggestions and advice for going digital first?

Thanks in advance.

It’s the end of the fall semester and as I take a breath and take stock of the past 16 weeks I am optimistic. As a professor in the Schieffer School of Journalism at TCU, I have finished classes and turned in grades and feel pretty good, not about the job I’ve done as much as the excitement I found in 18 students.

The 18 made up an honors section of our Introduction to Journalism class, the first time in more than a decade we’ve taught an honors class in our program. I’m glad we did, and that I had the opportunity to teach the class.

What I found with these high school high-achievers in their first semester of college is that they’re excited about journalism and recognize the opportunities ahead.

One of the keys I try to convey to my students is that journalism isn’t dying, even if newspapers in the way we’ve always known them may be.

We don’t have a consumption problem for news. We have a monetization problem.

And, as it turns out, the 18-, now 19-, year-olds may have it figured out more than the rest of us.

One thing they certainly don’t see is a future for paywalls, except for very specialized content. They expect news to be free. It’s what they know.

They’ve always relied on news online, on-demand, wireless and in non-traditional ways.

When I ask where they get their news from the answer is mostly Facebook and Twitter and their favorite news apps.

They’re not tied to the past. They’ve grown up in a world where change happens fast, where technology is evolving. They remember when MySpace came… and went.

So while they may not had previously heard of Spot.Us, the West Seattle Blog or ProPublica they get that journalism is changing. Those models aren’t so crazy. They’re open to new ideas.

When I told them they were required to start their own website and professional social media accounts, it wasn’t such a distant concept. In just a few minutes they could become their own news outlet.

When I gave then an entrepreneurial assignment to develop an idea for a journalistic product or service, they began to see how they could combine their passions (fashion, politics, food and sports among them) with journalism and their own business.

They’re open to all of this.

It’s not that they don’t want to work at CBS News or The New York Times, they just get that there is a lot more to journalism now.

Faced with this timeline I prepared that shows how reporter used to work vs. now, they’re not dissuaded.

They get that the job has changed and they’re fine with it. In fact, they’re just as driven as any young journalists have ever been.

Like many of their contemporaries, they have a strong sense of a social mission. They want to report on the issues that matter. They’re idealistic. I love it.

One student told me how important it was for her to work on a story about Iraq War veterans because her father had served in Vietnam.

Others are frustrated that more people their age aren’t engaged in politics and want to help produce journalism that is relevant about the government and politics for young people.

They know our democracy cannot survive without vibrant journalism and they want to fuel the reinvention.

Let’s not mess it up before they get to do that.

It’s a way for these news organizations to extend their reach and build their brand across media.

Well, in France it’s no longer legal for broadcasters to promote their social media pages.

The Daily Mail quotes a spokeswoman for France’s television regulatory agency, Christine Kelly, saying preference shouldn’t be given to the two popular social media sites.

“Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition?” she asked, according to Mail Online.

“This would be a distortion of competition. If we allow Facebook and Twitter to be cited on air, it’s opening a Pandora’s Box — other social networks will complain to us saying, ‘why not us?’”

Journalists will still be allowed to more generally promote their social media accounts, but not specific sites (insert wink from anchor here).

If the name of a social media service is integral to telling a news story then broadcasters can utter the banded Facebook or Twitter.

The removal of promoting these sites is an interpretation of a 1992 law that sought to limit thinly veiled advertising (the link is in French, so if you’re like me it’s not going to help much. However, if you do read French please let us know your interpretation).

Of course, this isn’t product placement. Using social media is an attempt by these journalists to connect to their audiences and spread news and information.

Maybe I’m just an ethnocentric American who thinks the viewers and listeners can decide if their trusted news source promoting Twitter or Facebook is really some evil plot to undermine competition or just a way to reach people where they are and in a way convenient for them.

The two main points:
1. Users can view up to 20 stories (including video, slideshows and other multimedia content) a month.
2. Stories you are linked to from blogs, social networking sites and the like will not count against the 20 story limit.

The Times is testing this approach on Canadian users now and it will expand to U.S. and the rest of global readers March 28.

“It’s an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times,” wrote Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., “one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform.”

From a business standpoint he may be right. Newspapers’ current model isn’t working and they have to pay for all that great journalism.

Now for the BUT.

The Times attempted something similar to this and failed with TimesSelect, returning columnist content to free in 2007 after two years of behind a paywall.

This is what then-Times executive Vivian Schiller (we won’t get into what’s happened to her since) was quoted by Reuters as saying of the decision to end TimesSelect: “We now believe by opening up all our content and unleashing what will be millions and millions of new documents, combined with phenomenal growth, that that will create a revenue stream that will more than exceed the subscription revenue.”

So the logic then was to increase potential ad revenue by increasing the potential audience. Now it’s to do the opposite. It’s been pretty well established that putting up a paywall decreases views and thus decreases advertising revenue.

Then there is the other issue that so often gets overlooked: The NYTimes.com is hardly the only source for news. Many other sites, particularly those run by television networks have no incentive to charge for content. They never have. Savvy news consumers can simply go to cbsnews.com or ABCNews.com or a myriad of other sites to get essentially the same news.

Content is so widely available that, except for very specific stories, users don’t need The New York Times as much as The New York Times needs the audience for advertising. But legacy media, particularly media organizations with a proud history, have a hard time recognizing that.

That is a long way around to make my connection to television news and the challenge of paywalls.

For all of the other newspapers in cities across the country that have three, four or five television stations or more producing news and running their own websites, the news of the day is readily available for free. All a paywall will do is push people to other sources. No one likes to pay for something they can get for free someplace else.

Back to the Times, the decision to allow all users to read stories they are linked to makes their entire paywall moot, anyways.

If I really want to read a particular Times story and don’t want to pay, all I’d have to do is google the headline and find it linked from somewhere else and get it that way. That would just take a few seconds and not cost $15-$35 a month like the Times.

This is good for journalism.

More of us, which means more journalists and more of our audience, are able to shoot video almost anytime and anywhere.

These small devices allow us to capture news as it happens, allows novices to get acquainted with shooting basic video and allows citizens to contribute, too.

The quality of the video is improving, making it more acceptable for use in journalism.

When I began using a Samsung Blackjack more than three years ago at WFAA-TV in Dallas we were unsure if the video quality was good enough for a major broadcast station, even though we were planning to use the video only in breaking news situations.

We were pleasantly surprised.

The quality was good enough for on-air in the country’s fifth largest media market and for our website when getting video on fast mattered much more than the quality. We had success with this during severe weather, a gas tank explosion, elections and a terrorism trial. We won two Advanced Media Emmy Awards for our breaking news coverage in the process.

It was a novelty back then (not quite the old days, but 2007 does seem like a distant memory sometimes).

The point of the back-story is that I was recently asked to do a workshop on using Flip Video cameras for the Texas Center for Community Journalism. Using a cell phone with a good video camera works essentially the same.

Here are my top tips for getting the most out of your Flip: