BrianManzullo.com

Central Michigan Life’s five Web goals revisited

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.

* * * * *

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.

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A day of reflection: Summer internship is over… but much lies ahead, and I need ideas

Many hours ago, I walked out the doors of the Grand Rapids Press for the last time as a summer copy desk intern. I’m still not sure if that has hit me yet.

Three months ago, I went through a day of orientation, two more days of training on a vastly outdated pagination system and cracked into the inner workings of a newspaper I have come to greatly respect. Suddenly, it’s over, like it just brushed past me. The days of waking up at 3 a.m., sleepwalking into my work clothes and frantically trying to find my key card are, for the most part, behind me. I may be back for a week or two in December. I wouldn’t mind that at all.

I have an extremely bad habit of looking back on things and wondering what I could have done better. But I really don’t have that feeling leaving The Press. I did what I wanted to do. I worked on a handful of section fronts, paginated open pages on deadline, worked on the Web desk with posting stories and aggregating, and even shot, recorded and produced a Soundslides project.

Most of all, though, I learned a great deal about a newsroom’s inner workings, even if the traditional newsroom model is becoming more and more obsolete. I mentioned this before in a previous post. These are things that could be critical to me once I take the next step in my journalism career.

Speaking of which.

As you may or may not know, on Monday, I will take the reins as editor in chief of Central Michigan Life, CMU’s student newspaper. It is my fifth and final year in the newsroom that built me, from the ground up, as a journalist. It is a multiple National Pacemaker award finalist, the Michigan Press Association’s Division I general excellence award winner in five of the last seven years and the Society of Professional Journalists’ runner-up for best non-daily in the country two years ago (last year’s still pending). My job sounds simple: to keep this track record going. But not exactly a simple task.

Like a lot of student newspapers, CM Life is bearing the brunt of the seemingly-in-decline journalism industry. Budget cuts had to be made yet again for this year, including a dock in pay to staffers. Advertising is scrambling right now, doing the best they can to rack up all the extra revenue it can get. And, of course, there is the annual turnover: Many experienced and talented journalists from last year are off to the real world, leaving big gaps to fill. These challenges aren’t for journalists with weak stomachs; the entire industry is going through these sorts of problems.

Being someone who is as passionate about this industry as the next journalist, I am more than willing to meet these challenges head-on. CM Life is directly responsible for my growth, particularly my superiors throughout the years. My goal in my final year is, with the much-needed help from the rest of the Life crew, to put another stamp on this newspaper and find ways to make it a better source for Central Michigan news and discussion. The Web site redesign, launching in just less than two weeks, is only the beginning.

With all that said, I have a general question for those who have served as editors at student newspapers: What advice do you have for me? What challenges did you face that you weren’t expecting to find? What new things should we try, in print, online or both? Is reporter/editor interaction with readers online a good thing (something we may try this fall, for the first time)? The more ideas we get flowing around, the better. Have at it!

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Day 3 of redesigning cm-life.com: Logos are a-changin’, plus new features

After putting up the first prototype logo for the new cm-life.com in the previous entry and getting advice from several other journalists and designers, it was obvious we had some work to do in that department.

After all, I didn’t want to go too much further in designing the site without having a logo virtually set (again, barring little fixes). That’s where the branding starts. I needed the other elements of the page to play off of it. And I admit, the first shot at a logo was flawed in several ways. I went back to the drawing board and came up with something new.

So allow me to introduce the second edition of the logo (above, right). The smaller text may or may not stay. It’s there right now for the sake of the site’s nameplate, and to see how it plays off the logo. I do think this one fares better in branding the Web site, in addition to being much simpler. I may look into making the text bolder (the font I used for it does not have a bold version, unfortunately).

New Features to expect on the new cm-life.com:

• Mobile Alerts: Through a widget on the right side of the site, or on a separate page linked at the top, we will give readers the opportunity to subscribe to mobile alerts, which we would write separately in the control. We will use this function to send big breaking news updates, reminders on upcoming special sections and more. This is definitely useful if we want to connect to a mobile audience. More and more people are getting their news through cell phones.
• Today’s Edition: On our current site, you can view front-page PDF’s when you scroll down on the left side. On the new cm-life.com, our entire issue will be viewable through Issuu. Click here to see it in action with a different publication.

Of course, there will be plenty more to offer on the new site. This is just a tease, I guess, to our regular readers.

Keep checking for more updates on the cm-life.com redesign. I’m hard at work on it. Have ideas? Have a comment on the logo? Anything else? Leave a comment!

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Day 1 of redesigning cm-life.com: Organizing for simplicity

Today has been a grueling day, the first of many to come over the next month. I began my foray into the CSS/PHP world on WordPress, with the help of CoPress’ Daniel Bachhuber (who, at the end of this, I’ll be sure to thank a thousand times), in redesigning Central Michigan Life’s Web presentation.

The logo you see in this post is what I have so far as the logo of cm-life.com come Aug. 20. I’m sure some will think it looks bland, and I thought so, too, since it originally was just a five-minute image I put together on Photoshop for the sake of beta testing. But I realized something like this was a perfect way to illustrate what our site will be about: Simplicity.

I’m not looking to shake things up with this design. Yes, there will be a handful of new features, but that’s not what this is about. In the end, it is the content that is going to keep our site thriving, and we have to ask ourselves how we can deliver that content in a simple, yet compelling way. If anything, our site will allow us to accomplish that goal. Worrying too much about the new bells and whistles you can add to a Web site can cause you to lose focus of what is truly important: How your content will look when everything is in action.

After several hours of toying with different styles, colors, backgrounds and layouts, I would say I’ve made decent progress on the new site. But, obviously, there is a lot more to get done. Having a logo and header navigation virtually all set is nice, plus some tweaks with story presentation. But I’d say all that is a small piece of the cake. I will provide more updates, I’m sure, throughout the weekend, since I will have plenty of time to work on the site.

Be sure to give your thoughts on the logo and the idea of simplicity, if you can. I’m sure there’s more to cover in that regard.

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