Earlier this semester (on Sept. 16), I wrote a blog post detailing five major goals I had for Central Michigan Life’s new Web site and its integration into our newsroom.
For those new to my blog, we launched a redesigned cm-life.com on Aug. 20, switching from College Publisher to WordPress’s content management system, with the help of CoPress. Since launching the new Web site, we have been working as a staff to take advantage of what we can do online and how we can build community using today’s technologies rather than putting too much focus on our print product.
Overall, it’s been a successful semester in terms of getting everybody used to the new Web-first mindset. We’ve had much more real-time stories and breaking news posted and, to some extense, an expanded multimedia presence. We’re also making strides in the use of social media, although we are addressing a few shortcomings in that area with the addition of an online editor next semester. But more on that later.
Here are each of the goals I set in September, and their progress:
1) Building a Facebook following and taking advantage of it.
The first part of this goal was the easiest. We began the semester (mid-August) with a little more than 100 fans on our Facebook site. When I posted my five goals in mid-September, we had 463. As of writing this post Sunday night, we have 2,014.
Our staff (including our advertising side) made a decent effort into getting people to fan our Facebook page and trying to reach goals of 1,000 and 1,500 earlier this semester. But what really worked was having the Facebook Fan Box on the Web site, in decent view (see the photo). Part of building a new branch of your Web operation is making sure people know about it, and this definitely put it in prominent view for many of our Web viewers.
Where we will continue to work on next semester is in the second part of the goal — taking advantage of Facebook. While we made sure to update the page regularly with stories and discussions, it wasn’t as consistent as it could have been, and I’d like to see more interaction among users in terms of not only conversation, but also posting links/photos/etc. Part of that is going to come from giving our readers incentive to interact with us on Facebook, so we have to tap into what they want to see and talk about.
2) Start bi-weekly CoverItLive discussions featuring public officials and/or student representatives
While we never got the ball rolling on the bi-weekly part of this goal, we did begin using CoverItLive on the news side, calling it the Digital Roundtable. We held one discussion Oct. 5 with our Student Government Association President and Vice President, and we held another two weeks later with three administrators — our Dean of Students, our Director of Student Life and our Director of Academic Advising and Assistance.
Both discussions went fairly well, despite being late in promoting both prominently in our newspaper. There were some big issues to discuss in both, particularly involving CMU’s new tailgating policy, a hot topic early in the semester, and even other lesser topics such as campus sidewalks and grade distribution reports.
The addition of an online editor next semester (David Veselenak, one of the brighter young journalists I know, coming off a semester as managing editor) will help in scheduling these Digital Roundtables more often, at least bi-weekly. I tried scheduling a couple more before the end of the semester, but they fell through late. One of the first roundtables we will have will ask readers what they want to see out of CM Life. Using it as a feedback tool, hopefully, will help us better serve our community.
3) Build a “Hot Topics” area with pages centralizing the biggest campus issues.
We were able to accomplish this goal a couple times this semester, but not in the way I originally anticipated.
Because of the controversy that heated up from CMU’s first home football game Sept. 19, in which the new tailgating policy caused an extreme dropoff of students at the main tailgate lot, I decided to make CM Life’s first landing page surrounding that ordeal. We placed the landing page links below our second row of navigation buttons (News, Sports, Vibe, etc.) and linked to it from our latest tailgating stories.
We found the page to be a success — according to Google Analytics, the page earned 3,646 pageviews since it was created Sept. 23 (see right), ranking #16 in pageviews on our site.
The second landing page we created involved alleged plagiarism on a National Science Foundation grant CMU was awarded in 2005. The page was created in mid-November and has earned 1,402 pageviews thus far. My thinking for early next semester is to create a landing page involving CMU’s operating budget (we had a bit of trouble and another that may surround CMU’s new president, George Ross. The hope here, as mentioned in September, is to make it easy for our readers to find content involving hot-button issues such as these. Another one that may come up is a possible search for a new football coach, with so many rumors surrounding Butch Jones and other vacancies.
4) Build a community photography site, allowing users to upload their pictures and review others.
This is the only goal we had difficulty making progress on. A lot of it had to do with how to go about making the Web site — whether to create a new domain name for it, whether to use WordPress again, what plugins to use, etc… and with a crunch on our budget and advertising revenues struggling (like it is with most, if not all, college newspapers these days), it probably is not feasible to devote more money to creating a sister site.
However, this idea won’t be abandoned. Any way we can get our readers to interact, we will experiment with. Facebook is one way to do it (as long as we promote it and, again, give readers incentive to post photos). We also could use Flickr in some way, like the Mustang Daily, Cal Poly’s student newspaper. And we’ll continue to look into building that sister site and see if it is, in fact, feasible.
5) Get the entire staff involved online.
This was probably our biggest success at CM Life, especially as the semester progressed. The way the newsroom was set up in the fall, every editor had a responsibility to post stories, breaking news, columns and multimedia rather than have an online editor do it all at the end of the night. All of us showed improvement in making sure stories were presented the best they could and that headlines, excerpts and tags were done well to take advantage of the Web’s ethic. The challenge from here is getting new editors involved and catching them up with working the new cm-life.com, but that should not be difficult at all.
More and more of our reporters are also linking to their sources and showing transparency in new ways, which is a welcome progression. Getting everybody on staff involved online is integral to giving our younger journalists the experience they need and the preparation necessary to survive in new media.
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So that’s our progress, in a nutshell.
So where do we go from here?
I’ll create another list of goals in January for the spring semester. There is still a lot we can do to work with our Web operation and expand it even further. Over the next three weeks, I’m going to write an online handbook for the CM Life office, detailing not only how to post every kind of story and multimedia, but also how to write effective SEO’d headlines, generate tags and use aggregation to your advantage. (And more, of course.)
Overall, though, the fall semester was a good start for cm-life.com. It’s always a challenge to move into something new and incorporate a new mindset into a newsroom previously focused heavily on print. From here, we just have to keep going, like I mentioned in September. It’s going to take a team effort to keep our Web operation effective and ahead of the curve.
Posted by Brian Manzullo at December 14, 2009
cm-life.com Redesign