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Have you ever written one thing over and over?
Yeah. That’s where I am today.
Anyway, the second issue of this year’s paper is out. Looks pretty nice, too.
Lots of areas the hardworking student-journalists can be proud of. Lots of areas for them to improve. That’s about where you should be in the second week.
You can see all the stories online at the also newly relaunched samfordcrimson.com
And now back to the same paragraphs of the same paper. I hate when that happens.
Hey kids, gather round and let the Boston Globe tell you how they built an all-in-one website. This is a useful approach because, as you know, we are all approaching the Web in our own way, which means the experience is a little better different for you on your laptop than my on my iPhone or the next person on their pad.
Why is this important? Mobile consumption is about to surpass the tied-to-your-desk variety. The current watchdate is 2015.
The year 2015 is when Back to the Future II takes place, too. Just so you know.
What will people be doing online? A little bit of a lot of things, but mostly social media if current trends hold. A lot of news spreads via social networks at this point, so that’s not entirely a bad thing.
There’s also niche news sites, which are becoming a growing field.
Everyone’s friend Andy Carvin, on how he balances the job and his valuable role live-tweeting the Arab world. Sanity is a word that appears in the headline, so that’s something to keep in mind.
I write these for a blog for work, and just reproduce them here. Like everything else around here, it is an evolving project, evolving right before your eyes, even! They get a bit too long, so I’m breaking them up in both places. Here’s a chunk of them for today, though.
A collection of some of the best 9/11 — 10 years on newspaper covers from around the country. There were many terrific ones to see.
Of all of the great pages to see, this is my favorite. The infographic style is also an example of turning a now decade-old story into something contemporaneous. If you read nothing else, click that link and read the first lines and then the bottom right corner. Here’s the supporting story.
Seems the Guardian overreached in trying to do a realtime feed of Sept. 11. The article talks about the still developing boundaries of Twitter. I think it just as importantly speaks to the “We made this culture” culture of Twitter, which is still evolving, and being driven by the masses, not what a news outlet thinks. Also it gets to the importance of listening in a conversation. Guardian tried something, the audience didn’t like it, told them and the paper, to their credit, listened.
How did members of the college media covered the biggest story of their young career? From studentpressblogs.org:
(T)he Associated Collegiate Press is making available a PDF file of its book, “9-11: The College Press Responds.” The book was published in Spring 2002 and includes a wide range of examples of how college newspapers covered the story.
You can see it, terrific, terrible stuff, as a PDF.
“But this first night is always a long effort.”
I said last night, around 11 p.m. If I had known better I would have written it differently.
I would have written “It will be a long night.” The headline above this would have read “And by long night I meant …”
And the text would have simply said “5:30 a.m.”
Now, to be clear: I don’t mind. I’ve been tired all day, but that’s part of the job and I love the job. After a series of first-issue problems, trial and errors the new staff put to bed a nice first edition this morning. I wouldn’t have minded a few more hours of sleep before saying that, but that’s the price of education by experience some time.
So about two-and-a-half or three hours of sleep this morning. And then today was our high school journalism workshop.
We had two series of sessions this morning and then two more sets in the afternoon. More than 300 students from across the area joined us.
Southern Living’s Kim Cross discussed their commendable series, Lessons from the Storm as a study in the use of multimedia.
CBS-42 reporter and Samford grad Kaitlin McCulley talked about television packages:
The kids had a great day:
I had an afternoon session, where two of the staffers from The Samford Crimson joined me. You can tell by their reaction that I’d just made a profoundly important point:
Anyway. After the workshop was concluded I taught a class on leads. It is perhaps one of my better lectures, which works out well since it is the first thing you read and an important component of a news story. That’s the first thing the journalism professors read when their students have created another issue of the campus paper.
Speaking of the Crimson, this was a big day. Sure, it was the first issue of the year. And it was delayed because of the storms that caused a campus-wide power outage yesterday. But, the paper returned to a tab size this year.
And the issue looks nice, too.
Also, we re-launched a new version of the Crimson’s website, too. There’s a lot to come from this new design and the content management system behind it — we switched from College Publisher, which is somewhat limited, to WordPress.
Here’s a screen capture of the old version:
And here’s the new version:
In this first issue we already have five feature stories, represented in those thumbnails below the main photograph. Below the fold the stories fall into a neat structure. There’s better comment moderation strength, ease of publication, a system I can teach to new students in under an hour and a very clean look.
Now we just need to put ads on it.
