It’s been awhile since I updated this, so I thought I’d write up a snapshot of what exactly I’ve been up to the past month or so.
On the online front, we have an online editor at Central Michigan Life — Dave Veselenak, who was managing editor last fall. This makes it a lot easier on me to focus on playing the editor in chief role — managing the staff and making sure the paper looks good and has good journalistic content. But it also helps to have another mind thinking Web an how we can use it to our advantage.
One thing we’ve done to begin the semester is built a Twitter page. Now, when you click on the Twitter icon on the right side of the CM Life site, it takes you to cm-life.com/twitter, a page that 1) shows a feed of the Twitter list “@cmlife/staff” and 2) centralizes all accounts for CM Life and its current editorial staff. I realize the “What we’re saying” box is obnoxiously big, but we haven’t quite figured out how to code the widget to float it right just yet. (If you know, tell me!) But the main goal, obviously, is to promote Twitter like we promote Facebook with the Fan Box — make it noticeable, and make sure people have a convenient outlet to engage with you.
Other things we’re covering, or will cover very soon:
- We’re using a new landing page: University Budget, which covers all stories this semester relating to CMU’s budget, which is expected to be cut anywhere between 3 to 9 percent within each cost center.
- We’re increasing use of the Digital Roundtable, our live chat series. At 8 p.m. Thursday, we’re bringing in CMU’s Police Chief, Bill Yeagley, to speak with us and with readers who wish to log in. We’re hoping to bring in interim President Kathy Wilbur, President-designate George Ross, Athletic Director Dave Heeke and more as the semester goes on. The more public officials, the more discussion, the better!
- Hopefully, we’ll finally get e-mail editions going again. This was popular with our readers when we ran College Publisher 4.0 and one of our biggest caveats when switching to WordPress. But it looks like we can move forward with that.
- We’ve had the Text Alert feature on our site since it launched, but I’m hoping to promote that a bit more and using it a bit more often than we do right now.
- Coming soon: A Central Michigan Life iPhone app? Time will tell on that one; Some of us at CMU are looking into the possibility. We do have a mobile version of the site, but not an effective one.
- I’m still working on the CM Life Online Handbook. The goal is to have it done and printed before I graduate. It’s basically going to be a comprehensive guide on using WordPress and the CM Life site, strategies and how to work with it in conjunction with multimedia and social media. About 10 pages of it are done, quite a few more to go.
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Another thing I did, particularly Monday, is write up a quick tip sheet for aspiring journalists in CMU’s journalism program (mainly new CM Life reporters). It’s important for us in particular to build up young talent because we have a lot of senior graduating in May (including me). So I wanted to come up with some general tips on how to move ahead, how to get better and what should lead to internships and jobs. I didn’t get too much into the meat of being a journalist (such as investigative work and things like that), mainly because that instinct should come over time with class work and experience. I just figure these are things journalism students can work on right away in building a brand, staying ahead on the field and such.
I will update again pretty soon on some other things. I have to catch up on Google Reader one of these days, anyway!
Posted by Brian Manzullo at February 3, 2010
Journalism, Updates