Five goals for Central Michigan Life’s Web site the rest of the semester
As you can probably tell from the sporadic posting on this blog, my life has been, for the most part, Central Michigan Life.
We’re in the middle of Week 4 of the semester – football season is under way, our first CMU Board of Trustees meeting is Thursday and the archives from as far back as 1999, thanks to CoPress, are coming to the new Web site. Things are going well for the most part, despite a few hiccups here and there. But that’s all expected.
I did get a chance to outline five goals I have for CM Life, particularly in its Web presence, that I’d like to accomplish by the end of my first term as editor in chief, which ends in December. (Not the only goals we have, just some of the more prominent ones) Whether all of these come through remains to be seen. But it all goes back to what I’ve been pushing since the beginning — interaction. Engagement. Collaborating.
1) Building a Facebook following and taking advantage of it
In mid-August, our Facebook page had approximately 115 fans and was used primarily as a news feed for our Facebook followers. One month later, we are up to 463 and counting. It’s time to do more with that audience and get even more people to become fans.
Starting Friday or early next week, CM Life is going to promote its Facebook page on a much larger scale in the print edition and on Twitter.
And, in addition to posting some of our featured stories on Facebook, we are going to start discussions on AT LEAST Monday, Wednesday and Friday, covering the issues and topics on campus people care about. For example, what people think about the CMU presidential search? How will the football team fare this year? Would you want concealed weapons on campus?
We also allow fans to post on the wall, share their photos and post links. These are things we have to promote, as well, since most do not know about those features. After all, if you’re going to give your fans the opportunity to do things like that, you have to let them know.
2) Start bi-weekly CoverItLive discussions featuring public officials and/or student representatives
We’ve already started working with CoverItLive in covering CMU football games. Now my hope is to take it to the News side, where we can encourage students to come in, voice their issues, concerns, etc. and allow public officials, administrators, and student representatives to join in and listen. We also want to give students a chance to voice their comments, suggestions, etc. to CM Life.
But back to the CMU side of things… a bit of background: CMU, from my perspective, has been extremely lacking in open forums with administrators to discuss how to improve campus. A few years ago, our University President, Michael Rao (who is now gone to VCU), hosted forums at least twice per semester where he would field questions from students. Two years ago, that stopped, because the administration said there was too small of a turnout, and we haven’t seen much since.
A couple weeks ago, the CM Life Editorial Board met with the Student Government Association President (Jason Nichol) and Vice President (Brittany Mouzourakis) to discuss ways we can work with SGA. Doing CoverItLive chats was one thing I mentioned to them. Students can’t always make it out to meetings and forums. But they can easily log on to a computer, on to CM Life and join a discussion that way. It’s not in person, but it’s convenient, and we’re entering an era of convenience. If you make it easy, students will attend.
3) Build a “Hot Topics” area with pages centralizing the biggest campus issues.
This one may take a little longer to complete, depending on the time I have.
But in my opinion, it’s needed. Sometimes you can’t search for every story concerning a big campus issue by searching for a key term or looking for tags.
So let’s make it easy.
Our two biggest issues: The approved Medical School opening in 2-3 years, and the search for a new University President. Those will be our first two “Hot Topics” (tentative name). Another one we might do deals with the CMU operating budget. But we’re still working on starting that series.
We’re going to create pages for these issues that feature every story in chronological order, newest at the top, plus any multimedia and links we have concerning those issues. The list, which will look a bit similar to The Spokesman-Review’s “Quick Links,” will go below the second navigational bar on our Web site. The Mustang Daily, the student newspaper at Cal Poly, also does this.
This way, if you are coming to our site looking for medical school news, or presidential news, everything is one click away. And we’ll continue building other pages, perhaps one for football, that will centralize content as well.
4) Build a community photography site, allowing users to upload their pictures and review others.
Let’s consider this an extra credit project. This would be, by far, the biggest undertaking of the five I have here. But, if built right, we would have a gem of a sister site.
We are looking at building a sister Web site to CM Life with a simple premise: Users submitting their photos of around CMU and Mount Pleasant and rating others with “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” and leaving their comments. After every year, we could publish a book with a compilation of the top-voted photography and sell it. Anybody could partake in this – professional photographers in the area to people with no photo experience shooting with their iPhones.
In essence, we want to create something similar to Capture Cincinnati. Images are powerful and, giving everyone the opportunity to show off what life in their perspective is like, and what they conceive as the definition of Mount Pleasant, is paramount. Sure, we are a smaller market than Cincinnati, by far, but getting a few dozen people to partake in this would be a start.
For now, people can share photos on Facebook, but it is nowhere near as extensive and as interactive as it can be. We’re looking at building this site by the end of the spring semester, if not much sooner.
5) Get the entire staff involved online.
Here’s the one goal different from the rest, in the sense that it deals with the management part of being Editor in Chief. CM Life has no set Web Editor; I oversee the Web operation while the respective departments post stories, multimedia, photos, etc., along with doing all the tagging, linking and embedding.
Why? To give everybody Web experience. To give everyone an idea of how our Web product is different from our print product and how we can take advantage of it together.
The goal from here? Simply keep going. I stress my editors to use Twitter as much as possible, and to get involved on Facebook as well, particularly on our fan page. We’re also teaching reporters the core basics of writing for the Web, and including links with every story. We’ve also recently started embedding YouTube videos when the time calls for it. I also plan on getting everyone involved with the other four goals, as well.
Now that the new Web site is up and the resources are there, it’s time to take the next step and create the optimal news experience for today.
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Great list of goals. Be sure to keep us updated!
All great ideas. I really like #4!