College Media Matters

As exams overtake most of academia, students are weighing in with way too many related memes.  In general, a few months after memes mania kicked off among students at schools nationwide, the meme-ing seems to be continuing.  Almost all related Facebook pages remain active and boast extremely high ‘Likes’ totals.  And most still feature a new meme daily or a few times each week.

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In honor of spring semester’s near-end, below is a sampling of finals memes– and a bonus one on a student laundry disaster.

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*One unrelated bonus meme*

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Related

College Memes Mania Continues: Hunger Games, Mean Girls, Adderall, Kony, Trayvon & Santorum

10 More Funny College Memes: Kony 2012, Spring Break Tans & Dorm Bathroom Cleaning

10 More Funny College Memes: Book Buybacks, One-Night Stands, the Health Center & Frat House Bathrooms

10 ‘College Freshman’ Memes: A Glimpse at How a New Hampshire Senior’s Pic is Being Used (#Memes)

10 Funny College Memes: Adderall, Dorm Bathroom Habits, High Tuition Complaints & More

College and University Meme Pages: A Starter Guide

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In a new column so meta it almost explodes, Red & Black staffer Julia Carpenter writes about the rigors of writing a column on deadline.  In between repeated word count updates, the University of Georgia junior compares journalistic deadline writing to drug abuse and calls it “one of the bloodiest, most soul-eviscerating activities known to mankind. It’s really messy and I hate it.”

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She openly muses about vapid ways to increase the column’s word total, including the insertion of extra adjectives or a “half-imagined anecdote.”  She admits to grabbing whatever sustenance is nearby to help her cope with the “full-body experience” that is deadline writing, including “drinking the shit out of this Vitamin Water.”

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She also lies multiple times in the column and then almost immediately admits to lying, blaming the deadline pressure.  As she notes, “Oh my God, y’all.  Why am I telling so many lies?  You know why?  Because writing under deadline turns me into a horrible, manic person.  A harlot and a liar.  Well, the harlot part isn’t true.  See, I lied again.”

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At the close, she admits: “I’m over word count and two minutes late.”

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It’s an interesting piece.  I’ve reached out to Carpenter to inquire about any serious deadline writing tips she might be willing to share.

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The Reporter, the country’s only full-color weekly college magazine, is suddenly drowning in uncertainty and bracing for a redefinition that may cut the full-color, weekly or magazine parts out of its identity.

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The publication’s host school, the Rochester Institute of Technology, just announced that it is selling an in-house printing press that has long published the Reporter at “reduced rates and [with] donated paper.”  An arrangement with an outside press will likely leave the Reporter “unable to maintain the volume of magazines produced . . . at a rate that fits within its budget.”

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As the esteemed Chris Zubak-Skees shares on his kick-butt blog Infinity Quad, early ideas being bandied about include a dramatic page count drop; a switch to a digital-first mentality buoyed by a monthly or quarterly print edition (instead of a weekly); and even a reinvention as solely a mobile app.

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The bottom line, as the sub-hed of a related story in the magazine itself confirms: “Reporter Changes Ahead.“

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The cover of the Reporter’s current issue.

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Related

Plagiarism Body Count at Rochester Student Magazine: 1 Fired Writer, 2 Resigning Editors, 2 Pulled Stories

Rochester Student Magazine Changes ‘F-ck Cats’ Cover of April Fools’ Issue at Request of School Officials

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The Daily O’Collegian at Oklahoma State University is enjoying marginal success with its metered pay wall a bit more than a year after enacting it. At the start of spring semester 2011, the paper became the first U.S. student media outlet to charge a subset of readers for its content online, requiring a $10 yearly subscription fee for individuals outside the campus area who wanted to read more than three articles per month.

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In an excellent recent MediaShift piece, Alexa Capeloto provided a progress report on the O’Colly’s efforts, confirming the paper now has 177 paid subscribers. The numbers beat the expectations of the paper’s general manager, even prompting him to already slightly raise the annual subscription fee to $15.

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As Capeloto writes, “There wasn’t any national news on the OSU campus that might have lured a burst of new paid subscribers. They came slow and steady, never exceeding three per day. Looking ahead, [the GM] has budgeted $3,000 to $4,000 in revenue from online subscribers for the next fiscal year . . . a mere drop in the outlet’s $700,000 budget, but a drop nonetheless.”

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As a huge fan of innovation and experimentation within college media, I enthusiastically applaud the O’Colly for being a pay wall pioneer. But at the moment, I am still against the mass adoption of metered pay walls by student press outlets nationwide.

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Financial Pinch

The hard truth is that student newspapers are financially struggling at the moment. The decade-long economic plights of the professional press have at last weaved their way into the land of college media. If not quite a time of reckoning, it is definitely a prolonged period of profound change– cutbacks, weary sighs, and hopefully a few spirited reinventions.

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Some campus papers have cut the number of days they publish each week. Others have reduced the number of pages they print or their page sizes. Many are pulling back on staff pay and perks like conference travel. A few have appealed directly to students and alumni for funding help. A small amount have launched magazines in hopes of broadening their readership and ad appeal. And a few papers have even gone dark entirely, mostly at smaller schools or community colleges in which related journalism programs have also been shuttered due to state funding cuts.

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Students are still reading their campus newspapers in print, by all accounts at a reliable, surprisingly high rate. But advertising is tougher to come by. Related school budgets in some cases are tightening or disappearing entirely. And student governments are getting occasionally restless as they look at papers’ financial bottom lines.

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Amid this bleak backdrop– what USA TODAY describes as a pronounced “financial pinch”– any idea within reason to generate new revenue digitally is being considered.

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Pay walls are a bold idea, to be sure, but not yet the right one for most of the student press. They embody what Bryan Murley at the Center for Innovation in College Media calls “the coins-in-the-couch model of making money.”  They may help papers scrounge up a few bucks short term, but at what cost?

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Pay walls are still part of a closed online culture most netizens are not yet willing to broach. Within college media, they will hurt student learning and employment opportunities. And most student press outlets are simply not ready to provide the content and creativity paying readers will demand.

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Student Media’s 1 Percent

The O’Colly is a top-tier publication, boasting daily content online and a huge alumni and supporter base worldwide interested in checking out what’s happening at Oklahoma State. In Occupy Wall Street terms, the O’Colly is among student media’s 1 percent.

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By comparison, a large majority of student media appeal to a very small readership. While their content might be appreciated, paying for it will most likely be a deal-breaker for all but a few diehards.

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We need to be honest: Most student newspaper websites are nothing more than slightly repackaged versions of their print editions. Many are not updated more than once a week when school is in session and barely at all during summer and winter breaks. They offer few, if any, multimedia extras. And the featured work can be a tad, ahem, inconsistent.

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For free, they are fun reads, but most don’t scream worth-a-fee quality. Even with an über-cheap pay wall, it is hard to imagine most papers getting 17 subscribers, let alone 177.

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To read more, click here or on the screenshot below.

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If you want bad news with a college connection, start with The Review.  The student newspaper at the University of Delaware is superb at spotlighting the seamier, sadder, and less legal goings-on at UD and the surrounding city of Newark.

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The top headlines rundown on the paper’s homepage is unlike any other I’ve seen within collegemediatopia– almost always teasing out a rash of crime or sudden death stories.  The bottom line: While UD may not seem like the safest, most carefree school to attend, it’s clear no bad news is going unreported.

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The latest Review rundown involves a cellphone theft, a noise violation, a hate crime, a rock climbing death, a beer bottle tossing, and, in the story promoted with the pic, a fire, rape, and murder.  (News Judgment Game Alert: Which article is most newsworthy?)

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Related

Times are Tough at University of Delaware!

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Roughly a year after “one of the deadliest, costliest, and most widespread tornado outbreaks ever to hit the United States” struck Tuscaloosa, The Crimson White at the University of Alabama has put together a comprehensive multi-platform news package reflecting on the storm’s impact and the challenges CW staffers faced covering it.

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Last April, the paper’s editorial team triumphed amid tragedy, reporting with real-time verve and multimedia vigor during the tornado’s immediate aftermath.  For their work, I placed them in the CMM Hall of Fame– and most recently unofficially nominated the paper for a Pulitzer Prize. :)

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Their current three-pronged effort: a temporary special homepage featuring content from a year ago and today, including 10 new web-only articles and a few multimedia projects; an ads-free commemorative print edition with more than 20-storm focused features; and a 15-minute documentary video outlining the staffers’ natural disaster reporting experience.  The doc’s title: “Harder Than We Thought.“

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A is for Ambassador.  B is for Band Member.  C is for Chess.  D is for Dubstep.  E is for Event Planner.  F is for Forensics.  G is for Guns. . . .

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Those are the first seven headlines in a yearlong 26-part series currently nearing completion in The College Heights Herald at Western Kentucky University.  “WKU A to Z” features students and a few faculty whose side-jobs, club activities, life passions, sexual identities, genetic anomalies, and professional goals can all be categorized under different letters of the alphabet.

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Herald features editor Emily Patton, the series leader, said part of the paper’s aim is to spotlight people with slightly unique abilities or sensibilities whose names and faces would not otherwise be considered newsworthy.

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“We wanted to take snapshots of individuals’ lives, regular Janes and Joes” said Patton, a senior news/editorial journalism major at WKU.  “A lot of times people don’t get in the paper unless they’re doing something incredibly unique or bad or really good.  So I think this series simply recognizes all the people who are special just for being themselves.”

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For every letter, there is a story.  R is for Racquetball.  S is for Saxophonist.  T is for Twins.  U is for Umpire.  V is for Violinist.  X is for Xylophone. . . .

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In the Q&A below, Patton discusses the series’ start, standout stories, and reporting methods.  She also offers advice for student journalists interested in similarly exploring their campuses– from A to Z.

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Q: How did the series come about?

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A: It was actually really simple at first.  It came down to basic mathematics.  We have 26 Friday issues a year.  We were looking for a way to have a series that would run on those 26 Fridays where we could be proactive and we wouldn’t have to worry about whether we had a story to run based on outside events. . . . There are 26 letters in the alphabet so it was just kind of “OK, 26, what can we do with that?”

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We wanted to look at students who people see all the time on campus and have questions about and make up stories about in their head, like, “Oh, he’s doing that for this reason.”  For example, I was stopped at a red light on campus the other day at a crosswalk and this guy who walked by my car was juggling.  He was just doing it like it was normal, like he does it all the time.  I had no idea who he was.  But then days later I overheard people talking about “the guy who juggles.”  I thought, “Wow, that could be the same guy I saw.”  Then more people came up to tell me about him.  I sent a couple reporters on my staff out to find this guy.  It wasn’t hard.  In an hour, they found “the guy who juggles” and we are going to do a story about him.

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It’s those kinds of stories that I know people will pick up and read.  It’s those kinds of stories that keep journalism around.  We want to read about other individuals and stuff that impacts us or walks right by us every day.

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To read more, click here or on the screenshot below.

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