Comments on: The Cracks in College Media 2.0

By: 25 Random Things About Modern College Media: Part 3 « College Media Matters

25 Random Things About Modern College Media: Part 3 « College Media Matters — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:24:39 +0000

[...] text, lacking images, and an absolute affront to link journalism. Worse yet, some outlets have no Web presence at all or scant efforts, such as a site housing PDFs of past print [...]

By: Brandon J. Mendelson

Brandon J. Mendelson — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:33:04 +0000

What can we do to make that percentage drop faster than the Dow?

There needs to be an incentive to participate with the paper.

Journalism students don’t want to do it (they need to find a different career now), and some students don’t feel they are compensated enough (either via credit or payment.)

Some school papers, and I won’t name names, promise to pay their contributors but fail to do so for a number of reasons.

So, and this can be applied to almost every paper in SUNY (the world’s largest comprehensive college system), the problem is offering a meaningful incentive.

P.S. Good luck trying to fight with student governments (who fund most SUNY newspapers) to raise the amount of money budgeted for the campus paper. There are more than a few stories of nasty student governments hacking the budget because of unflattering stories.

By: Schleuss

Schleuss — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:08:03 +0000

I went to a small liberal arts school too, and it just got an online version last year. It uses College Publisher which offers some pretty dreadful design. I’d like to see more papers (and students) creating their own school-unique designs and making them easier to use for future generations of students.

Maybe I’m asking to much. But then again, I’m working on reinventing the college yearbook’s web presence.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:55:05 +0000

I’m almost positive that the answer you’re alluding to is the online-only student news startup. Those newspapers who don’t yet have a website in 2008 have already, dismayingly, proven themselves incapable of adapting to change.