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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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The anatomy of a college breaking news story

One of the most critical parts of our job at Central Michigan Life is breaking news.

We print three days a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday – which means we spend Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in the office. So breaking news on those days is relatively easy. Everyone is in the newsroom to plan a course of action, including several reporters standing at the call.

But what about the off days?

Our fall 2009 staff faced its first test last week, when chemical exposure forced students, faculty and staff out of the Dow Science Complex early Friday. The university, after months of testing, finally made use of its Central Alert system to notify all classrooms and students subscribed to the alert service. That was our first whiff of the incident – the morning after a long production day, when much of the staff is tending to classes and other non-work related things.

Here is how we broke the story:

1) Getting a reporter and photographer to the scene.

A couple of our editors, including our managing editor, Dave, were in class when they received the alert at 10:44 a.m. They immediately made some phone calls and reached one of our senior reporters, Jake May, who agreed to head to Dow as soon as possible. They also called our photo editor, Ashley, who proceeded to make calls herself, and got at least one photographer to the scene.

But the beauty of a campus newspaper is this: While nobody is all that easily on call on non-production days, there are still reporters and photographers on campus going to class, staying in residence halls and so on. This means when city fire and police officials, along with a HAZMAT team, are sitting outside a building, we have reporters and photographers taking initiative, making phone calls, talking to people and getting right to work. We had at least one of each doing so in this particular case. A campus newspaper editor’s dream.

But while all this was going on…

2) While sending people out, posting the story online and spreading the word.

This part is critical. Central Michigan Life’s specialty will always be getting the in-depth story and providing coverage nobody else can. But when breaking news happens, readers expect you to be on top of it, even when a campus alert system beats you to the punch (which is expected, in this case). So while we have people working on the in-depth story, we had to get something online quick. We posted what we knew, making sure all the information was verified (from the alert itself). A good idea, too, although I don’t think we exercised this with the Dow story: tell your reporter to call with bits and pieces when they have the time, or have a second reporter go out for the sole purpose of doing this.

Don’t stop there, either. Take advantage of your social media crowd. Tweet it. Throw it on Facebook, if you can. Tell them to keep updated on your Web site.

We kept on top of it as much as possible until the main reporter, Jake, left the scene to compile the story. Then…

3) Breaking the story little by little with online story updates and Tweets.

We didn’t just wait for our reporter to have the full story typed before updating. Ideally, we want to train readers to check our site as much as possible when a story is breaking.

How to do that? Breaking bits a pieces of the story online with constant updating. Once the first five graphs or so are typed, edit and post. Once five more are done, edit and post again. We used Twitter to our advantage throughout, as well. A later campus alert told us to call CMU Police if we left stuff in the building. We tweeted that information right away and got it right into the story.

4. Now that the story is posted and developed, getting multimedia online.

While all this was happening, we had at least two photographers return to our office to upload photos. Ashley was in the newsroom looking through them and taking two select photos to throw into the story. This allowed us to put our story in the “Featured” slideshow area, the most prominent story area on our site.

In the meantime, our photo staff was compiling a slideshow and, when campus announced a small press conference outside the building with an update to the status of the building (at the time, it was set to close until Monday), we sent Jake, who had his story updated and posted, and gave a video camera to our managing editor to put together a video presentation. We spent the rest of the afternoon getting those on the Web, then tweeting and linking to them.

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And that’s all she wrote. We broke the story, developed it, Tweeted/Facebooked it and put together several presentations of the story (slideshow and video) within one day.

We also had an update Monday, explaining the use of the Central Alert system which, prior to that day, was not used outside of testing.

All of this might seem like standard operating procedure for any college paper, but the trick to this was fully covering all angles of this on what is normally an off day for CM Life staff. You can’t teach passion in journalism and, sometimes, that’s what it takes to get people rolling on a big story that comes up.

We could’ve easily wrote the story, edited it, posted it and left it at that. But our staff kept thinking of ways to cover this story outside of standard reporting. The slideshow and video gave us those options. It’s constantly thinking outside the box that separates a great college newsroom from a good one.

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Want to maximize Twitter’s capabilities in a newsroom? Don’t stop with the news feed: Add the human touch

If you’re a Twitter user like me, you probably have a handful of news publications, organizations and blogs giving you updates every time they add content. Which, in many cases, is nice to have. It’s like a quicker and simpler RSS feed.

But if you’re like me, you also have certain publications, organizations and blogs that practically spam your feed. This can happen in one of at least two ways: 1) They constantly update with every little story that makes its way onto the Web, or 2) They wait until specific points during the day to shell out 15-20 tweets within a span of 2-3 minutes. There are more annoying ways this happens, I’m sure, but those, to me, are the most prominent.

Anyway, this sort of behavior, especially during a time where spammers frequently show up on Twitter, begs the question: Is this annoying splatter of information really all that effective in getting people to click your links?

A Grand Rapids Press copy editor, Todd Fettig, who happens to be my intern coordinator and a Central Michigan Life alum, conducted “experiments” throughout the day, using bit.ly’s tracking service given to users who sign up (for free). He tracked a comparison of how many people would click bit.ly links to a specific address when the Grand Rapids Press tweets it and when he tweeted it. He found comparable and sometimes bigger spikes in clicks when he tweeted a link than when the Press did.

(Before I go any further, do note that this is a very unofficial experiment. We have no way of truly knowing how many people are clicking The Press’ link, only how many are clicking Todd’s link, which bit.ly gives him)

I decided to conduct my own unofficial “Todd Fettig” experiment. I tweeted a link to an MLive story regarding taxes on beer, cigarettes and soda, a similar tweet that “michigannews” made about a half hour earlier. I used bit.ly’s Web site to create the link so I could track it later. Twenty minutes later, here was what I came up with:

Within a span of ten minutes after michigannews posted its link, 5 people clicked bit.ly links to go to the story. Within ten minutes of mine? 10.

That might not sound too drastic to you. But take into account that michigannews has more than 2,200 followers, compared to my 227 as of this posting.

So what’s my point?

If you’re a Twitter user, take a moment to reflect how you use it. You have news organizations shuffle links your way all the time. But how many times do you actually click their links? How many times do you find yourself clicking links and going to news stories because actual people are tweeting or retweeting them?

This scenario speaks volumes about today’s news and where we choose to get it in this information age but, for the sake of this post, let’s keep this in the Twitter realm. This calls forth how news outlets can maximize Twitter’s potential. Even with social media being as young as it is, we are programmed to look at news organizations’ Twitter feeds as simply news feeds rather than recommended reads. If you are one of these organizations, that is not necessarily a good thing. You want people clicking your links.

But when another one of our followers adds a human touch to those links, we tend to listen. We see value in those links, making it more enticing to give them that all-important click. That also makes it more enticing for a retweet, which gets even more people clicking.

Imagine the kind of power a news outlet can have on traffic if dozens of its employees built their own name brand within their community or audience, gathered sizable Twitter followings and spent even a small part of their day retweeting recommended links to stories on their publication’s site (without spamming). You will drive more traffic to a site that way than any automated news feed ever will.

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Journalism quick hits amid the redesign: J-schools need to move ahead

For the better part of the last week, the redesign of the Central Michigan Life Web site has been my life apart from work at The Grand Rapids Press. So I haven’t really had much time to cruise around the Web in search of good reads on the journalism industry, social and new media, etc.

But here are two of the better ones I came across yesterday and this morning, and some of my thoughts in regard to them:

Fundamentally rebooting J school Daniel Bachhuber

This is a great read on what journalism schools need to do to keep up. How does J-school need to adapt for tomorrow’s needs? This was a question I purposely didn’t address when writing about J-schools and, from my experience, how they currently help aspiring journalists in teaching core journalistic skills.

Yes, those core skills still are important. But new ones need to be taught, and they’re not.

My J-school at Central Michigan went back and forth when deciding whether to stay accredited by the Accrediting Council on Education and Mass Communication, a distinction shared only by Michigan State University in the state. By following accreditation, the J-school had to impose credit limits for courses taken inside journalism (44 credits, including specific courses) and outside (80 minimum, including 65 in liberal arts and sciences). These requirements burdened our J-school because it sought to add an online journalism curriculum to teach Web skills and software.

After initially deciding to rid of the status because of its incompatible credit-hour limits with a desire to teach online journalism, students began an outcry that led to possible reconsideration. Former faculty even wrote in to complain.

I was vehemently against this outcry. Students weren’t doing their homework. They felt losing accreditation meant a hit to the resume without looking at what what it didn’t do for them: Give them the classes and skills they need to survive in tomorrow’s journalism. It’s the Accrediting Council’s responsibility to update its requirements for what students need and they had not done that, at least not last February.

Besides, I would argue losing any accreditation does little to nothing in hurting a resume in an industry where experience trumps everything and employers are looking for interns or new hires based on their previous work. Yes, studying at a well-recognized journalism college is helpful, but not as helpful as working with an award-winning college publication (i.e. CM Life), which is right at every CMU student’s disposal no matter what their concentration is. If CMU is worried about losing a selling point for prospective journalists, use CM Life as your selling point. You will learn these tools there better than you ever will in a classroom anyway. Bottom line.

This is not to complain about the CMU J-school. It’s making strides. Just last year, it received a renovated multimedia lab, located on the same floor as CM Life, with new Mac computers and a ton of useful software such as Final Cut, Soundslides, Adobe Creative Suite and more (thank you, former Board of Trustees chairman Jeff Caponigro). This helps students. Accreditation, in my opinion, doesn’t. At least not as much as people think.

I would ask our J-school not to sell out for what essentially is a meaningless stamp on a resume when you have so much more to gain from actual teaching of online journalism. These tools, along with social media stalwarts such as Twitter, can’t be learned overnight.

Speaking of teaching online journalism…

How to teach online journalism: Six questions Mindy McAdams

This is a good perspective piece on what journalism classrooms should be incorporating. CMU’s J-school does a lot of things to help students with multimedia – for example, in my Photo Editing class, we had two Soundslides projects in addition to laying out photos on centerpiece pages. Other classes get dirty with InDesign and Photoshop work. The online journalism curriculum offers Web work with Dreamweaver (although too much emphasis on the Dreamweaver aspect instead of regular HTML and CSS, from what I hear.

CMU’s J-school could use new techniques to compliment old ones, such as “speed stories,” in which students have to spend their 50- to 75-minute class time to go around campus, find a story, conduct at least two interviews, return to class and write the story. Why not incorporate video and/or audio work somewhere in there?

I’m also hoping classrooms incorporate Twitter, RSS and/or Facebook in some way. I’m afraid social media and aggregators have no place in most journalism classrooms right now. A major problem, if you ask me.

Also, be sure to check the links at the bottom of this page. All great reads, too.

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Conversing digitally at public events using Twitter

PORTFOLIO UPDATE
+1 Page Design (”Savory Sensations”)

It’s amazing how a simple networking tool such as Twitter can be used in so many ways to communicate. The Grand Rapids Press, a newspaper crazier about Twitter than most, introduced me to another this summer.

Grand Rapids hosted its 40th annual Festival of the Arts, one of the biggest West Michigan events of the year, in early June. To summarize it in one sentence, several roads are closed off downtown to showcase arts, entertainment, music, activities, food and more for one weekend.

Prior to the event, the entertainment staff, led by editor John Gonzalez, began promoting the use of a hashtag, #festivalgr, for all Twitter conversations involving Festival (the short term for it). They spread the word in the newspaper (see the “on Mlive” refer below), usually attached to all advance stories and refers. They had other Press staffers begin using the tag, as well, to spark the conversation.

The idea behind it was more than just conversation: It was to get people tweeting about Festival from Festival — using mobile phones. Just eat the best grilled pizza you’ve ever bought? Tweet it. Watching a local band put on a great show? Tweet it. Just find a tire swing you want your followers to know about? Tweet it. Using the #festivalgr hashtag, of course.

With the Press heavily promoting #festivalgr as much as possible and several reporters and editors sparking the conversation, other people began joining the act. I attended Festival on a Friday, the first day, and regularly checked #festivalgr on my phone to see what food and sights people were talking about. I saw a couple people recommend a food booth with delicious Mexican, so I tried it. One mentioned a tire swing in a hidden corner of the event area – my roommate and I eventually made our way over there.

It might seem like a gimmick idea at first. But it was surprising to see how many people in the community followed along with #festivalgr. They did the same with the 17th B-93 Birthday Bash, a weekend concert extravaganza in Ionia, Mich., by using #bash17. This hashtag particularly became popular to use among bash-goers when a storm front came through the first night and flooded the parking lots, leaving most cars stranded for an entire week, some with permanent damage. The Press did it one more time with #rothbury when Rothbury Festival came around. One of our music bloggers, Troy Reimink, used the hashtag frequently there, jotting down his thoughts about performances and select quotes he overheard.

These types of conversations don’t occur very much anywhere else on the Internet. They do with Twitter.

That’s why I find the use of these hashtags as a great way to bring the Grand Rapids community together. Although many people at Festival don’t even use Twitter, let alone use it on their phones, there still were a handful of people providing updates on when they were going, who they wanted to see and even giving recommendations on food and sights to see. A year from now, Twitter’s population probably will have grown by hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. Talk about a great way to chat with other community members you might never meet otherwise!

This type of communication also can help during, say, a hurricane watch or warning, even if the hashtag needs little help in promotion. Kevin McGeever, TampaBay.com editor, sprung the question to me earlier this week. While the tag will create itself through its news impact (people will begin using, say, #adam for Hurricane Adam no matter what), you still could promote its use and get even more people using it to converse about the storm, where it’s going, how to prepare for it, where there are shelters, etc. You could, in this type of emergency situation, get a lot of people to join Twitter just to help out, as well.

I’m sure the Grand Rapids Press is not the first news organization to utilize Twitter and hashtags like this. But I think any outlet that has big events to cover throughout the year (which, really, is all of them) should utilize this. It may not work as well at smaller community newspapers with fewer people, but it can be extremely effective among those who use Twitter.

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