In a recently completed survey of California community college journalism programs, faculty advisers said that the biggest change in their programs over the past year was that their student publications went online for the first time.
Just five years ago only a handful of California community college student publications were online. Today 80 percent of the schools with publications have started online versions with many of the remaining 20 percent in the process of getting online. Many of those with the third-party vendor College Publisher, which provides a free content management system designed for college publications and represents more than 500 schools across the country.
California’s huge community college system boasts 109 campuses located from near the Oregon border to within site of the Mexican border. In any given year, about 65-70 of those schools publish a student newspaper or have a regular journalism program. Fifty-six of them now sport online publications –two-thirds of them through College Publisher.
Of course, getting online is only the start for student publications. To prepare students for tomorrow’s workforce, journalism program must revamp the thinking of students who are used to publishing a print edition only every other week, or less often. With online publications, students have the ability to treat breaking news with the urgency it requires. And students can learn new multi-media ways to tell stories. Not all are going to run across the problems the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech had in the opening hours of the shooting tragedy it faced a few weeks ago — the site got so many hits it crashed — but every college publication can have the ability to compete with the mainstream press with the insightful coverage Times students provided once it got back online.
It will take a mindset change, though, from thinking about print deadlines and learning to post first, print later.
There are several stages college publication staffs have to go through to get online publications to the stage where students are getting effective training for the future.
Stage One
Get online. Start a site and get used to updating it on a regular basis. Content management sites, even if their output resembles blog output, are the easiest and most efficient ways to do this. Bryan Murley of Innovation in College Media has prepared a great discussion of how to get online tools for colleges. Among the most affordable for low-budget college programs is College Publisher’s CMS.
Stage Two
Shovel content from the print edition to the online edition. Most California community colleges are stuck at this stage. They create print edition and then move the content wholesale (often minus photos) over to the print edition. Any online exclusive content that might appear on the site is content that was created for the print edition but did not fit into the space.
Murley suggests that there needs to be an intermediate stage here where student journalists — shoot, all journalism publications! — need to start adding live links to their stories or posting links to original source documents. Not a bad idea.
He argues throughout his ICM site that publications have to be willing to let their readers stray away from the publication home sites from time to time to let readers have access to the most important information. Trust them and give them a good product and they’ll come back.
These links might include something as simple as a link in a movie review to the official movie web site.
Stage Three
The online becomes important. At this stage students are comfortable enough to consider design of the web site important.
(Actually, some schools have a parallel Stage One where they bring in an HTML techie who wants to wow the world with a complex design — remember the old IBM commercials where the techie asks whether the client wants a spinning logo or a flaming logo? Journalism/content takes a back seat. Programs that have faced this parallel step like their product initially, but find it too difficult to maintain once the techie moves on.)
Design is important, but content rules. At Stage Three students start to experiment with some true web-exclusive content. They may start with breaking stories or see the value of different story forms, such as video, podcast or slideshows (with sound).
At some point, possibly here in the evolution of Stage Three, Murley argues, publications need to start thinking about community and involving their readers in the process. The publication of tomorrow will not be one where the journalist decides what stories to tell, the readers will. Witness the success of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. Student publications will become irrelevant if they don’t invite their readers to become a part of the process.
Stage Four
The online is fully integrated into the process. Stories routinely are told in forms designed for online, including blogging, podcasting, videos and more. Updates, exclusives, etc., are common.
Stage Five
Who knows? At this stage the online prevails. Some suggest that it will replace the print edition. Clearly the online publication dominates the thought process in storytelling. Print becomes a convenient way to reach other audiences instead of being the main audience. Your readers are engaged with the online publication and provide content and comments. They hold you accountable with access to instant participation.
While most California community colleges are still stuck in Stage Two — not a surprising result given the number of schools that have gone online in just the last year or two — some are stepping into Stage Three. According to that recent survey of programs, only 14 percent said they tend to post stories first and consider print later. But three-fourths reported that they regularly have online exclusives on their sites. Three-fourths of them contain interactive polls — a built-in feature on the College Publisher sites. And while only a quarter of the publications reported including podcasts, videos or blogs, 51 percent of them said they regularly contain slideshows.
A simple tool they are using to create those slide shows is SoundSlides, a shareware program that easily combines graphics and audio into attractive slideshows.
While advertising is important to the financial health of any student publication, few California community colleges have tapped into the online advertising market. Those who sign through College Publisher forfeit national advertising to the company; that’s the price of the otherwise free tool. And few, 21 percent, have developed strategies for attracting local online ad sales. But it is early in the process; two years ago that number would have been closer to zero.
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Related blog sites that talk about online student publications:
