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NewspaperShift
Why It's a Bad Idea for Student Press to Fall in Love with Pay Walls
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...
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TVShift
A Cord-Cutter's Life: 10 Lessons Learned
I cut the cable cord in early 2006. When I tell friends and colleagues I'm a cord-cutter, the biggest misconception -- beyond initial worries about the phrase involving bodily harm -- is that I don't watch TV. I have a 42" flat screen. I watch TV all the time. I just don't watch regularly scheduled, commercially interrupted, monthly bill-required...
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Social Networking
College Memes Madness: Students Posting Non-Stop on Facebook
College memes are suddenly invading the Facebook streams of students at schools throughout the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe. As The Cherwell, Oxford University's student newspaper, explains, the meme is "an idea or behavior that spreads through a culture by imitation. Internet memes follow this principle, humorous images are copied and re-captioned, concisely describing or satirizing the activity of...
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Philosophy
Romenesko Gets His Mojo Back After Leaving Poynter
Jim Romenesko is having a good time. Lately, the "journalism evangelist," "KING of the blogosphere," and "go-to source for news about the news" has been waking up earlier, posting more often, and featuring content he had not felt free to publish for more than a decade. In the wake of his abrupt departure from The Poynter Institute late last year,...
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EducationShift
Year in Review: Most Viral Student Media of 2011
Strippers. Shootings. The Oscars. Osama bin Laden. One-night stands. Natural disasters. Asians in the library. And skinny jeans. These are a few of the most prominent buzzwords at the center of the student news stories, columns, online creations, and video rants that went viral in a major way over the past year.
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MediaShift
A Strange, Sad Day in Journalism: Romenesko's Resignation
Aggregation is an underappreciated art. Sure, with a quick tutorial, almost anyone can perform some version of it. But I have stumbled across only a few individuals and media outlets who have done it really well for any length of time on the web. Jim Romenesko has heavily influenced the practice of online aggregation. By many accounts, he was one...
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Social Networking
Google+: Social Media Upstart 'Worse Than a Ghost Town'
I wanted to log on to Google+. I swear I did. But the thought of it made me tired. I recently wrote a piece for MediaShift on the perils of tweeting interview requests. Like I've done for past pieces and many of the posts on my blog College Media Matters, I carried out all the expected social media promotion. I...
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NewspaperShift
Revolution in Georgia: Student Newspaper Goes Digital First
The Red & Black, one of the largest and most-feted college newspapers in the country, recently dropped a bombshell on its readers and the student journalism community. In a wraparound section of a special issue published on the first day of the new school year, the University of Georgia student newspaper revealed it will be switching from a daily to...
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EducationShift
Twitter Interview Requests: #Innovative or #Epicfail?
Over the past year, I have noticed an emerging student press trend sweeping the Twitterverse: the tweet greet. An increasing number of student journalists appear to be using Twitter as the prime spot to seek sources for their story or class assignments and to make first contact with these sources. The result: a dramatic rise in brief, public, and sometimes...
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EducationShift
NextGen Journal Gives College Students' Spin on Global Events
Connor Toohill is attempting to break the college bubble. Last fall, with the help of friends, Toohill launched NextGen Journal, a student-run news and commentary site, writ large. Its roughly 90 contributors are currently enrolled at colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada. In terms of sheer geography, Toohill has arguably filled college media's biggest niche. At the moment,...
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EducationShift
UPIU Mentors, Publishes Student Journalists Around the Globe
Suleiman Abdullahi was recently an eyewitness to the birth of the world's newest nation.
In early January, the 20-year-old Kenyan journalism student flew to Juba, Sudan to cover the massive referendum responsible for the creation and upcoming independence of South Sudan. As Abdullahi wrote, he arrived in the prospective nation's capital city with a travel visa, a press pass, a story budget, and a 48-hour window to interview, observe, and report upon "the history that was about to be made."
By the end of his first day, he was under arrest.
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EducationShift
10 Reasons Our Student Newspaper Blog Stinks
Amid many scoops and successes this semester, The Minaret, the weekly campus paper I advise at the University of Tampa, has endured a major bust. Roughly three months in, our efforts to launch a buzzworthy and newsworthy blog have failed -- spectacularly.
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EducationShift
How College Students Became Mini-Media Moguls in School
In April 2007, Zephyr Basine arrived at school for her noontime biology seminar -- and immediately zoned out. Instead of learning science, the sophomore at the University of Massachusetts Amherst carried out a "fashion-scoping session." While the professor spoke about organisms and evolution, Basine focused on her fellow students' outfits and accessories, scouting for something new, chic or trendy.
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World View
College Media in Iraq Offers Independent Voice for Students
When Namo Kaftan was 9 years old, his father, a biomedical engineer, brought a laptop from work home to the family's residence in Sulaimani, Iraq. For Kaftan, now 21, it was love at first boot-up. "I was really amazed to see a new advanced technology like that," he said. "I guess at that time nobody even knew what it was...
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EducationShift
How Going Online Can Help Save Struggling College Papers
In an old episode of "The West Wing," a leader of an AIDS-stricken African nation tells the president plainly, "It's a terrible thing to beg for your life." The quote comes to mind as I read about the current plight of the Technician, the student newspaper at North Carolina State University. In a recent editorial, the few remaining staff at...
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NewspaperShift
College Media Should Ignore Siren Song of Pay Walls
The drumbeats are growing louder, as Rupert Murdoch, Steven Brill, and now the New York Times have confirmed: Pay walls or metered pricing systems for online news content will soon be coming to a high-profile website frequented by you. Too little, too late? Journalism's savior? A final nail-in-the-coffin separation between old and new media? The implications for the news industry...
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