Check out this fascinating interview with Bryan Murley of Innovation in College Media and Howard Owens, director of digital publishing at Gatehouse Media, Inc.
Owens sets out a beautiful blueprint for advisers to follow to redesign their journalism programs -
ICM: Just as an overview, what are some of the things you are attempting to do in these papers that might be adaptable to other situations like college media?
Owens: Of course, a fair question might be, what can we learn from college media, especially about appealing to a younger audience, and filling a niche? But I think there are things that might be universal.
Web-first publishing – publish quickly and often, everything you know that might be of interest to your audience, and on print deadline, pick the bet of what you published online, maybe (if needed) flesh it out a bit and print it.Second, think like bloggers, everything published on the web: write in an authentic voice, be real, be honest, be transparent. Related to web first publishing, publish what you know, don’t wait for for the perfect fact or quote to make your story.Third: multimedia, especially video, is critical to engaging an audience. Create video that is highly watchable, fun, authentic, interesting, well thought out to the context of how it’s being used. That applies to both pro and college media, I think. I should add, it doesn’t address the issues around UGC (user-generated content), but they are relative easy for existing media to capture.
Owens also talks about blogging and the need for advisers to learn and embrace new forms of journalism. Quite an interesting read.
At PJC, we are adding blogs to our site this semester. College Publisher can create a template for CP sites. Is anyone else considering adding blogging or publishing the news in blog templates?
