"UWIRE, a popular service that aggregated articles from student newspapers across the country, promoting student journalism both within higher education and to the outside world, has disappeared," wrote Simmi Aujla for the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month.

Today, visitors to the site receive an error message, and the people running the service have had little to say publicly. As a result, there has been intense speculation about the site, along with complaints from student editors who say they are owed money by the service. (To read some of the online discussions taking place about UWIRE, check out this post and this one.)

As the director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, I've followed the UWIRE saga for quite a while. I interviewed Joe Weasel of Palestra.net after they purchased UWIRE from CBS. For the past two years, I also helped raise awareness about the UWIRE 100 program by blogging about it (see my 2008 and 2009 posts). While looking into this story, I contacted Weasel for an interview, but he declined to comment on the record.

A Flawed Business Model?

In some ways, the shuttering of UWIRE should come as no surprise. The service did not have a workable business model as a stand-alone entity. Its previous incarnation as part of CBS seemed to make more sense, as a major media corporation would have the resources to leverage UWIRE content for other distribution channels. That said, public comments from UWIRE general manager Tom Orr suggest that the company hopes to resurrect the service.

"UWIRE has temporarily suspended its print wire operations," Orr told the Seattle Spectator. "The company is in the process of trying to get the wire relaunched as quickly as possible and when more information is available it will be made public."

The Spectator called UWIRE "student media's AP." That's overstating the case. As near as I've been able to gather, UWIRE was a curator of material gleaned from college news outlets throughout the country.

Unlike the Associated Press, which collects fees from member news outlets, UWIRE "affiliates" (meaning college news outlets) never paid to republish the content distributed through the service. UWIRE did sell some content to other media outlets, but that was hardly a major source of revenue.

The reality is that a college media wire service would not be able to charge a substantial sum to college media outlets. More importantly for college media (and college journalists), there was no revenue returning to the people who created the UWIRE content.

Unless and until a wire service like UWIRE is able to figure out a way to return some revenue to the college media outlets that generate content, active participation is always going to be a challenge.

Who was using the content?

A number of college news outlets used the UWIRE material, but solid numbers are hard to come by. UWIRE's "About Us" page claimed that its "...14-year-old Student Media Affiliate Program allows 800+ student media outlets to share content and facilitates inter-school collaboration. This entirely student powered wire service generates more than 500 stories a day, including first rate news, opinion, sports, and entertainment coverage."

Although more than 800 outlets shared their content with UWIRE, there's no accurate count of how many news outlets actually used the content.

Mark Witherspoon, adviser to the Iowa State Daily college paper, said, "Our students used a lot of UWIRE columns for their editorial pages, and those pages have suffered because of UWIRE leaving the scene."

"The UWIRE columns were always nice as good backups when the creative well ran dry locally," said Robert Bortel, adviser to the BG News at Bowling Green State University. "They have historically used some of the straight news, too, but we were able to replace that with AP. Lately, our news hole has shrunk because of fewer ads, so many days we are almost all local with AP world and state digests to complement the content. And as for the goal of being more hyper-local, which we all like to banter around as a catchphrase, that is a good thing, too."

The Daily Eastern News, the college media outlet I help advise, also occasionally used UWIRE content. Yet the disappearance of the site hasn't caused any problems in our newsroom. That's probably the case for many college media outlets.

College News Network

While the particulars of the UWIRE situation get sorted out, what's a college news outlet to do? Certainly, wire services like the AP are available, although the cost of AP content is prohibitive for many in this economic climate. Previous efforts like CSUWire (see my interview with its founders here) have come and gone. There is a need for college media to have access to the college-related content generated on other campuses, so other options might be viable.

The latest option to emerge is College News Network. Ryan Dunn and Dave Hendricks of Ohio University (both of whom are editors at the Post), have so far signed up 14 college news outlets. Hendricks said the inspiration for the site came from a summer internship.

"I'd interned at the Columbus Dispatch this summer, which spearheaded a content-sharing agreement among Ohio's newspapers," he said. "We figured a content-sharing network would help fill space on the Post's opinion page and allow college papers to share big stories, like the out-of-control street parties at Kent State and Ohio University last spring."

He said they are looking to recruit as many sharing partners as possible. "The arrangement should benefit student reporters, who gain access to a wider audience, [as well as] readers at colleges across the country, who will gain access to perspectives and news from other student-run media," he said.

College News Network does not edit the copy it receives. It relies on student editors at the various member news organizations to do that.

UPDATE 5:21 PM CST: Via the comments, University of Tennessee Professor Jim Stovall points out an effort that was started a couple years ago: The Intercollegiate Online News Network. Be sure to check out his comments for further details.

Other Options

There are also a couple of other content-sharing options for college media. One is to start using Publish2.

Publish2 allows individual journalists to bookmark specific stories and share those links with the wider Publish2 community, or create smaller groups of people to share those links with. (You can see my Publish2 links here.) Other news organizations can then create widgets on their web pages that link to content they found via Publish2.

There's already been an early example of local newspapers collaborating on a big story through Publish2. My concept is to take that idea a step further and allow college media outlets to publish the linked articles in their newspapers.

It would be relatively easy for college media outlets within a state, or an athletic conference, to agree to share their content via Publish2. Once the content was published, they could use Publish2 to point to their best stories, and allow other newspapers in the "co-op" to use the content.

The main downside to this approach is that there is no centralized editing process, which was UWIRE's bailiwick. The pool of articles available would also be relatively small compared to UWIRE's output, unless a large number of college news outlets signed up.

College media outlets would need to get together to communicate and set up the service with licensing agreements (a headache in itself), and maintain the service by actually linking to the articles -- a dicey proposition come exam time.

The other option would be for college media outlets to do something that might seem radical: use Creative Commons to license their content for non-commercial use, and thereby let other college news outlets have access to their work. At this point, I'm not aware of any college media outlet that has taken the Creative Commons route, although I've had listserv discussions with fellow advisers about the concept. The usual argument against a CC license is one that's been heard before: The content is too valuable for this approach.

The "value" of articles in a college newspaper is a topic for another day, but the idea of licensing content for non-commercial use so that other college newspapers could access it and use it to supplement their own coverage is worth considering in the Internet age.

*****

Are there other options for college media to share content? Let us know your ideas in the comments.

Bryan Murley is assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University, where he advises DENnews.com, the Pacemaker-winning online site for the student newspaper. He is also the director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, where he leads the weblog Innovation in College Media. He is the college media correspondent for MediaShift.

But hard as it is to believe, there are still student newspapers around the country that have no online presence at all. At the Associated Collegiate Press Summer Workshops recently, I asked for a show of hands from students whose newspapers didn't have websites. In two sessions, several hands were raised.

I won't say which schools these students represent, but I've come across the phenomenon in other presentations over the years as well. And it still surprises me that any school newspaper would be without an online presence in this day and age.

[update 8-12-09: per the comments, Bob Bergland notes a survey he conducted: "We were amazed to find that 36% of the 392 papers analyzed (random sample from the ~1,600 on the E&P directory) did not have a web presence (defined as no site, a site with no content listed as being under construction or a site which had not been updated in over six months)."]

There are two primary obstacles for getting a college newspaper online: One is relatively easy to overcome (technology), the other much harder but more crucial overall (institutional).

Technology

I spoke to one student who was working to bring the college newspaper online at a school in the Southeast U.S. This student had a lot of questions about content management systems: Which one is best? How difficult are they to install and maintain?

Honestly, the technical issue is one that can be overcome in an instant if you just want to get started. There are two fine weblog publishing platforms (out of many) which can provide a college newspaper with a place to put content online: Blogger and Wordpress.com. Both will allow students to experience the joys of a content management system and putting content online. If you've got no budget and no technical help, this is the easiest way to get online now.

If you want a turn-key content management system with your own domain name and ability to control some of the advertising, there's College Media Network (CMN), which will keep the back-end running while young journalists focus on the content. Some would complain about some of CMN's advertising, but I've never had a problem working with the network to remove ads that, for example, might offend sensitive sensibilities on a religious campus.

And if you want to go all-out, then there are numerous open-source content management systems (CMS) that you can install on a server on your campus or on a hosting service. (See this CoPress wiki for information about three top open-source content management systems.)

Institutional

A more important obstacle for some schools that still don't have an online presence is the institutional one. When I started advising, I worked at a private college that was affiliated with a religious denomination. We had an online site when I got there in 2001, but there are still private religious institutions that keep their student newspapers from publishing online.

I have heard several justifications for this reticence, but they are all, at heart, about protecting the image of the university or college.

Make no mistake, college news is a messy business. Students are learning, and their mistakes all too often show up in print. An online presence will broadcast those mistakes to the world, so the theory goes. Also, a college that supports student press freedoms when distributed to 2,000 people on campus might not be so keen to distribute "bad news" about the campus when the whole world is watching.

There's also the trouble with donors. When I was advising at a private school, we got several comments from donors who were outraged at some of the advertising that showed up on our student newspaper site. Personally, I thought these complaints were overblown, but I'm not in charge of development. We walked a fine line in those discussions. My argument to donors would be this: Do you want this to be a respected institution, or a backwater for propagating nonsense? If the former, then push to get students online. If the latter, then stay offline and wither.

A disservice to future journalists

Trumping all those considerations, staying offline is a disservice to student journalists who cannot use the online tools now widespread in the industry. A student who can't put material online can't really understand the impact of social networks like Twitter or Facebook to spread news. They can't really understand what it is to create a personal brand. And they can't really understand the challenges of multimedia production.

A college that will not allow their student journalists to practice online journalism in a "real world" setting is abandoning its commitment to education in order to save face. And that is a tragedy not only for the college, but for the students who look to higher education to prepare them for the future.

Is your school keeping you from pressing forward in online news? Drop a comment, even anonymously. This is truly the last frontier for online journalism. Let's see if we can pull together to get all student newspapers online.

Bryan Murley is assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University, where he advises DENnews.com, the Pacemaker-winning online site for the student newspaper. He is also the director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, where he leads the weblog Innovation in College Media. He is the college media correspondent for MediaShift.

The school announced it would be requiring all incoming freshmen journalism pre-majors to purchase an iPod Touch or iPhone. At least that was the lede in stories by the Columbia Missourian and The Maneater.

But the "requirement" wasn't really a "requirement," if you read further into the Missourian article:

The requirement will not be enforced, however, and there will not be a penalty for students who chose not to buy an iPod touch or iPhone, [Associate Dean Brian] Brooks said.

"The reason we put 'required' on it is to help the students on financial need," Brooks said. "If it's required, it can be included in your financial need estimate. If we had not required it, they wouldn't be able to do that."

Indeed, the school's FAQ about the new requirement calls it a requirement for "a web-enabled audio-video player":

This requirement is best met by purchasing the Apple iPod Touch, which has all the features the Missouri School of Journalism intends to implement to achieve its academic objectives and those of its students. There are alternatives to the iPod Touch, but none that we consider equally capable...

The faculty of the school, which had apparently not approved the "requirement" when it was announced, voted to approve it after some heated debate.

Now, I may be reading a little too little into the phrase "web-enabled audio-video player," but it sounds like a laptop (which the J-school already requires) would be more suited to that description than an iPod Touch or iPhone.

Perhaps they meant to use the word "mobile" or "hand-held" in that vague terminology, because that's clearly what they are aiming for in the rest of the FAQ.

Mobile Newsgathering

Rob Weir, director of digital development at the Columbia Missourian, explains in more detail about what the requirement might mean.

Weir seems to be in favor of the move:

Now, aside from the 'recorded lectures' thing, there are other ways students could use an iPhone or iPod Touch -- for mobile newsgathering, for application development, to read news, etc. And teaching students to use an iPhone for newsgathering doesn't lock them into that API any more than teaching InDesign means you have to use that for design.

[See more from Weir in an UPDATE below.]

Kelsey Proud, a junior journalism major at Missouri, isn't as supportive.

"I'm the very first person to say innovation is wonderful," Proud told me. "What I think has been done here is that we've kind of put the cart before the horse. It is good for the future of journalism that we start learning how to use mobile technologies. But, making it a requirement for freshmen who may or may not continue into the journalism school...I don't think is appropriate."

She notes that many incoming freshmen do not end up finishing the journalism major, and students are concerned about costs and the utility of the new hardware (as you can read in this Maneater editorial: Journalism school should drop iPhone or iPod Touch requirement).

iPod Requirements Elsewhere

Using iPods to attempt to better educate university students is not new. Duke was the first U.S. university to give iPods to freshmen in 2004.

Alex Klein, online editor for the Duke Chronicle, hasn't noticed that the iPods handed out at Duke made much of an impact on the Chronicle's online traffic -- yet.

"Student (and staff/faculty) readership of our print product has remained and will remain strong, at least in the near future, no matter how popular mobile devices get," he said. "There's just something very collegiate about grabbing a physical newspaper to read at lunch or, more likely, during class that makes it difficult to see a future without ink-stained fingers."

Klein thinks the iPod Touch/iPhone requirement is not the best approach for Missouri, either.

"I think it's great to recognize that news distributors must focus on bringing their content to smaller machines," he said. "I do not think it's great to make mandatory the purchase of a specified, closed device that is merely part of the end user experience, not the production process. I think it's a tough argument to make that these journalism students need iPod Touches in order to learn that point."

Abilene Christian University was the first university to hand out iPhone/iPod Touch hardware to all incoming freshmen last year.

Cade White, assistant professor at ACU, has been pleased with the educational aspects of the iPhone on campus, but the school's media haven't taken advantage of the mobile platform as much yet.

"It is one of the platforms that must be considered, one of the endpoints of consumption that must be considered when producing content," White said. "Right now, mobile interfaces are not a primary concern of producers, and understandably so. But that is going to change, and in the future, content creators are going to have to deal with the mobile platform."

After wrestling with this story for two weeks, I still don't have a clear-cut stance on the overall topic. At Eastern Illinois University's journalism department, we just initiated a "laptop initiative" for incoming freshmen requiring a Mac laptop and software. The justification for a laptop purchase is easier to make because it is a technology that will serve students in all their classes across the curriculum.

The requirement for a mobile device is more difficult to justify. It can be done, and the Missouri journalism school has made a reasonably strong case for their initiative.

Here are some potential advantages and disadvantages to such a requirement, as far as I can gather. If you know of others, please drop them in the comments.

Advantages

• Establishes most incoming students on a single "mobile" platform -- Just like using a single PC or Mac laptop across the curriculum helps eliminate cross-platform headaches, assuming a single "mobile" platform will help instructors as they prepare content.

• Allows students to become familiar with uses of "mobile" technology for newsgathering -- Students will be able to use these devices to record interviews, send stories from the scene of a news event, and find other uses for small devices in the journalistic space.

• Allows students to become familiar with the "mobile" environment/lifestyle -- Students who may have never used a smartphone will be able to understand how these devices are used and broaden their perspective on news consumption in the wired world.

• Allows faculty to develop and experiment with new ways of educational delivery -- Podcasts, videocasts, applications, and other potential delivery methods may open up new avenues of learning.

• Allows in-house media platforms to experiment with different ways to deliver content via mobile technology -- This requirement will allow the school to test different iPhone apps with a built-in audience, and allow students to share in that development process. That's especially relevant at Missouri where they've had iPhone app development contests.

Potential Disadvantages

• Requirements that aren't requirements -- I understand the reasoning behind making this a "requirement," but the double-speak is painful from a journalistic standpoint, and surely will frustrate students who may be satisfied with the mp3/mobile/whatever technology they already have.

• Locks students into a single, proprietary "mobile" platform -- Apple's iPod Touch/iPhone platform is only one of several mobile platforms competing in this space. Focusing on that platform ignores other options like Google's Android, Windows Mobile, the Kindle or other e-reader devices, and other smartphone platforms.

• Cost -- Is it appropriate to require students to purchase additional technology in this economic environment, when many are already struggling to make ends meet, stay in school and purchase obscenely priced textbooks and other requirements for college?

• Ignores future developments that may alter the balance of power in mobile technology -- The iPhone/iPod Touch has the "mojo" at the moment in the mobile space. But again, four years is a long time to say one platform will dominate in the mobile universe (see Palm).

• Underutilization of technology by faculty -- Additional efforts at podcasting class lectures, publishing educational content to new applications, etc. will require additional time investments from faculty. I don't know about the workload at Missouri, but that additional time will have to come from somewhere.

For now, Missouri's J-school seems set on moving forward with the "requirement," despite the misgivings. And it will be years before anyone can adequately determine if it was the right decision or not. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

UPDATE (12:33 PM EDT 5-20-09): The Columbia Missourian's director of digital development Rob Weir adds some context via an e-mail to me. He says that the lecture-replay possibilities have potential for large classes. Students can "time-shift" and listen again to lectures while they are multi-tasking.

There's also the "Twitter effect":

Besides audio, still photos and video, students could also use an iThing to text or Twitter breaking news. Our local news station, KOMU, has already had a lot of success covering breaking news with Twitter -- a KOMU reporter was interviewed by multiple TV stations in Missouri in the course of reporting on tornado damage. She was tweeting en route to the story and before her on-camera reporting. It led to her not only getting exposure (which is crucial to a student reporter) but also led to her pretty important reporting getting further distribution.

You can make the argument that those functions can also be dealt with by using other mobile devices, and you'd be absolutely correct. But the iPhone or Touch also offers specific apps for consuming news, as well as a web browser that beats the heck out of anything else in being able to deal with sites that aren't opimized for mobile browsers.

Missouri's J-School has an iPhone app competition that will benefit from more exposure with incoming students (here's a news release about last year's competiton):

This year, several teams of students competed to build applications for the iPhone or Touch, and the winning teams got a chance to travel to Cupertino to present their ideas to Apple. In the process, they worked with computer science and engineering students, getting exposure to a broader set of skills than they might have merely from journalism students. And they learned entreupreneurship skills in the process, which we know are important for young journalists.

On the single platform advantages:

I get the argument that a lot of what we want to do with a Touch or an iPhone can be done with other devices. But the fact is that the Touch is free to students with a [Mac] laptop bundle, and there's a lot to be said for having them (mostly) using the same devices. As someone who also does tech support for the Missourian, I'll say that having a unified system architecture would save me a LOT of headaches on the integration side. (We already deal with far too many issues with negotiating between Windows, Mac and Linux servers.)

Thanks to Rob for providing some further context for the discussion.

Bryan Murley is assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University, where he advises DENnews.com, the Pacemaker-winning online site for the student newspaper. He is also the director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, where he leads the weblog Innovation in College Media. He is the college media correspondent for MediaShift.

Much of this economic knowledge has come from a burgeoning online industry in economic news. I first got hooked on NPR's Planet Money podcast through This American Life (pay particular attention to The Giant Pool of Money), then followed the links to Calculated Risk blog and others who followed the economy. As always, the New York Times' interactive graphics team has been working overtime (see here, here, and here, for instance). But there have been many others who've been doing a good job chronicling the recession. Check out the Crisis of Credit Visualized, or this layoff map from the Roanoke Times, or Scenes from the recession from the Boston Globe.

But while much of the professional media has mobilized to cover the crisis, the response by college media hasn't been as encouraging. Despite the wealth of new media tools that could help them to find and tell innovative stories, most college media have relied on a decidedly old-fashioned approach to their story-telling.

College Media on the meltdown

Over the past week, I've surfed a ton of college media websites looking for innovative ways these journalists were telling the biggest story of their generation. And I've mostly come up empty.

Probably the best example I have seen comes from the Amherst Wire, not a traditional college media outlet by any means. They covered the economic collapse in October with Market Meltdown 101. In March, they returned with an explanation of the economic stimulus package -- Economic Stimulus 101, which was tied to a FAQ about the stimulus package.

The Daily Tar Heel at UNC-Chapel Hill did a nice interactive graphic in October called Making Sense of the Economic Crisis, but there's been little recent activity to update that information.

The Nevada Sagebrush has a section about cuts to the state budget which includes a timeline (using Dipity), videos, and a salary database. A group of journalism students at UN-R are also covering the budget crisis.

Beyond that, things are a little sparse. Sure, lots of words have been written about students not getting jobs, or having job offers pulled, or enrollment in graduate programs spiking as students decide to stay in school (or go back to school) instead of facing a dicey job market.

But words don't really paint an adequate picture of economic downturns. Video and audio add to the picture (as in this InsideVandy piece), but there seem to be few attempts to really grasp the global crisis at hand, especially through data visualization.

Here are a couple of suggestions for college media to bring the topic of the economy home in ways other than the inevitable "jobs are tough to come by" story.

Many Eyes

The other day, I caught the Online News Association/Poynter Institute's ONAvation webinar on data visualization, which showcased Many Eyes, the IBM collaborative data visualization site. It's free for ONA members, and worth the cost for those who are not. After watching the webinar and spending a few moments with a spreadsheet, I came up with this visualization of U.S. bank failures by state.

You can embed the visualizations on any social network site or blog, and the data is viewable by others who are interested in the topic.

How can student news orgs use this tool? Is your university budget being cut? By how much? Perhaps that can be graphed over time. Perhaps you can partner with someone in the economics department to come up with some similar statistics that illustrate how the economy is impacting campus.

Questions to ask

The most frustrating thing in my tour of college websites is the "sameness" of much of the coverage of the economic situation. We get it, students are having a problem getting jobs. Really, we get it. With over 5 million people unemployed, we get it. So dig deeper. There are ways to show your fellow students how this economic downturn is affecting them in other ways than employment. Really. Think about these questions:

• How much is the TARP bailout going to cost me personally?

• How are my tax rates going to be affected by the stimulus package?

• What impact will delinquent credit card holders have on my credit card interest rates?

• How is the stimulus package going to impact my state specifically?

• What parts of the stimulus package are specifically geared toward college students?

• Why should I care about a "credit crisis?"

There are a lot of ways to present this information. My hope is that more college media outlets will explore those different ways to engage students in understanding the economic crisis.

Who do you know?

Earlier in the semester, I sent students in my multimedia journalism class out to do man-on-the-street interviews. Their assignment was to ask a simple series of question: Who do you know who has been impacted by the economic downturn? How were they impacted? How does that make you feel?

The fact is that at this point, we all know someone who's been affected by the economy. It may not be showing up on campus so much, but it's on the periphery. And student journalists can tap into that periphery to create compelling stories that hit home with fellow students.

I hope to explore this topic more in the coming months, and I hope student journalists will take more time to digest this important topic.

Disclaimer: I visited a lot of websites over the last week looking for innovative storytelling. Maybe I missed some. If so, please drop them in the comments. I'll update the post as needed.

Bryan Murley is assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University, where he advises DENnews.com, the Pacemaker-winning online site for the student newspaper. He is also the director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, where he leads the weblog Innovation in College Media. He is the college media correspondent for MediaShift.

So what are some of the challenges for smaller colleges?

1. Small staffs and high churn rate.
In 2007, the Flagler Gargoyle was a finalist for an online Pacemaker award for excellence in student journalism. At the time, the Gargoyle was using a WordPress CMS and producing multimedia. But advisor Brian Thompson saw that change quickly over the last year. "Innovation just completely died out," he said, "We had some kids graduate who had been totally instrumental in what we were doing, and didn't really have anyone in the pipeline to carry it on."

Now, with new online editor Matt Boyle, things are on the upswing. "He has students doing more video, podcasts, slideshows, web exclusive stuff and just thinking about what's cool out there that we can cover," Thompson told me.

Rich Cameron, chair of the Cerritos College journalism program and author of the JACC blog, has been pushing online journalism for several years in California community colleges. He said that the demands of print newspaper production still hinder the staff of the Cerritos Talon Marks from more actively pursuing an online presence.

"We have one or two who are starting to get it. A lot of others experiment," he said. "But we're so focused on a weekly publication with a relatively small staff and small pool from which to recruit that they just don't do enough. We're still looking for ideas."

2. Instructors who don't get it.
Advisers and instructors can be a help or a hindrance to developing online journalism in college.

Sarah Jackson, a journalism student at Kwantlen Polytechnic in Vancouver, B.C., told me that "most professors have little to no knowledge about multimedia. Their lack of knowledge sometimes misinforms us and could easily lead us to the wrong conclusion about the current state of journalism, if not for our other professors' efforts."

Jackson benefits from having instruction from Mark Hamilton, a journalism instructor who follows online media closely.

The hindering effects of out-of-touch advisors can be pronounced at a smaller school, Hamilton said. "A small staff of instructors means that a small number of 'curmudgeons' or, as I prefer, 'people who don't get it yet,' can have an oversized effect on the overall drive to multimedia/innovation."

Rich Cameron agreed that aging faculty hamper new media innovations at community colleges and universities. "We didn't learn this stuff and no one is giving us a lot of support to learn it," he told me, "We have a small few, like myself, that are pulling our colleagues along. But until we get new blood in with multimedia experience, we're going slowly." And community colleges are lower on the academic hiring shelf than 4-year colleges and universities.

3. Old mindsets from the students.

Another problem, one that is certainly not unique to small schools, is that a print-centric mindset often still dominates. But at a smaller school, this problem is magnified as well.

"I'm stumped about how to get students -- who SHOULD be more attuned to the innovative ways they like to get information -- involved in utilizing that information," said Cameron. Indeed, he said some student editors are weary of the drumbeat. At a recent editors workshop, "one of the things student editors from seven area community colleges said is that they felt that their advisers pushed new media too hard. It is kind of like telling my kids to eat their vegetables. I know it is good for them, but they resist."

Brian Thompson added, "The irony is that as much as they live on the Web, they still kind of see it as second fiddle to, say, the print edition or broadcast TV."

4. Not enough payoff for students.

In addition, it can be frustrating for student journalists to put a lot of effort into a multimedia package only to get a lackluster response.

"Our school has little to no readership for the college paper and the website," said Sarah Jackson about the Kwantlen Chronicle, "As far as I know, the college hasn't explored how to get students interested in the paper and, without interest, the effort online has virtually failed."

Likewise, Cameron told me, "Right now we have the audience for print and that's what our schools want. They'll applaud the new media efforts, but they could live without them."

5. Sparse resources.

While many college newspapers and journalism departments struggle with budgets, again the effect is magnified at smaller schools. "We just don't have the same kind of funding and equipment," Thompson said. "Even I am limited in what I know, and since it is a smaller college and I wear so many hats, it's hard to find that time to really focus on and make the web a priority."

According to Jackson, Kwantlen Polytechnic has only several computers with Soundslides installed and has put considerable money into its Mac lab to teach students InDesign and Photoshop. She added that most other schools "may not have this ability."

Words of advice

With all these challenges, how can a small school program or newspaper avoid being left behind in a wired world? A few ideas follow:

> Reach outside the comfort zone for recruits. Christina Drain, adviser for the Pensacola Junior College Corsair, kick-started her paper's multimedia emphasis by recruiting an art student. Now that the Corsair pursues a web-first publishing mentality, she said that "with the addition of audio and video, we can now recruit students who want to go into broadcast journalism as well as videographers. I always push the resume and portfolio aspect."

While drawing from journalism students, Cameron has also reached out to other areas of the Cerritos College campus, teaming up with the political science department on campus to initiate a project called MyDemocracy.

For Hamilton at Kwantlen Polytechnic, the key is finding "eager" students. "Multimedia/innovation has to be largely driven by instructors who will find in each of their classes a handful of people who are eager to big it up and run with it." he said, "They tend to drag some of the other students along behind them."

> It's still the stories, not the toys. "Don't get hung up on the technology -- you'll never win that battle. Instead, be creative," Thompson said. "Find energetic and innovative students, even ones who may have zero experience on the web. Try to involve the web in all of your regular editorial meetings and constantly ask how to involve that edition with print stories you're doing."

For Drain, that includes following the broader journalism world online. "I'll see something that someone else is using or doing and show (the students), like the local paper live streaming with Mogulus, and they think it's cool and want to try it," she said, "And that sets up some brainstorming sessions for possibilities. A lot of what we do is free or very low cost so that helps too. It's amazing what technology is out there."

Free software can be especially helpful for small schools. So you can't afford Flash and the Flash video encoder? Upload the video to YouTube, Vimeo or another video sharing site. For more information, see this recent post by Lauren Rabaino on the ICM weblog about inexpensive alternatives to the Adobe Creative Suite.

> Market your website. Doing cool stuff on the web isn't enough in and of itself. Thompson identified the old "if you build they will come" fallacy as what dooms a lot of online editions, even good ones. "You have to come up with good content (we're working on that) but then you also need to find innovative ways to get people there to it (and we're always trying to work on that)," he said.

Social networking is one way to get those stories out into the wider web, through Facebook pages, Twitter links and Digg efforts when appropriate. And that's also an advantage of using YouTube to host your videos -- reaching a wider potential audience.

> Follow the ongoing journalism discussion. Keep up to date about the latest discussions about what's happening in online media. Most of what I know about college media has come from engaging with a wide variety of students, advisers, professors and media professionals, including those who helped flesh out this article, like the group of journalists who gather on Sunday nights for the #collegejourn discussion.

A good place to start finding free tools and information is with the Journalism alltop page, which provides so much information that it might seem a little bit like drinking from a firehose until you get find some favorites.

> Lean into the wind. Find ways around the challenges. One thing I heard in discussions about small schools and online efforts was that there are ways that small schools can be more nimble than their larger counterparts.

"When you don't have all the tools at your disposal and you're all learning as you go along, it makes you more creative and you think differently. You try new things," Thompson said. "Look, we're never going to lead the pack when it comes to implementing technology, coming up with cutting edge ideas, using the coolest software or online tools. Larger schools will just kill us there. But that's okay."

Jackson sees potential in small numbers too. "Revolutions always start small. I think, with the right tools, small schools have an advantage. The students can quickly band together for group efforts that would be impossible for a class of 100+."

What are your suggestions to help small schools maintain innovation? Say something in the comments, or point me to other small programs/news sites that are striving to stay innovative.

Bryan Murley is assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University, where he advises DENnews.com, the Pacemaker-winning online site for the student newspaper. He is also the director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, where he leads the weblog Innovation in College Media. He is the college media correspondent for MediaShift.

Now the national economy indicates that the future might not be quite so rosy: The widespread economic pains in the media environment are finally hitting college news outlets, and many college newspapers are scrambling to deal with the squeeze.

Advertising

Just like other print newspapers, college newspapers have been hit by a decline in advertising revenue. Classified advertising has been declining thanks to the same pressures that have pushed professional media into decline: competition from online sites like Craigslist and strong verticals in employment and automotives.

But college newspapers are not as heavily dependent on classifieds as are other newspapers. Instead, they have been hit more by a decline in national advertising. "National advertising fell considerably for most papers," said Eric Jacobs, general manager of the Daily Pennsylvanian. "For college papers like ours, which typically receive a significant number of recruitment ads from Wall Street firms, the drop in national advertising was like falling off a cliff. Some of that national business will come back when the economy improves, but some of it is lost forever as numerous large companies simply ceased to exist."

Andrew Sawyer, executive vice president for media services at Alloy Media+Marketing, a company that sells national advertising in the college newspaper market, is more optimistic.

While Alloy's national print ad sales were "flat" from 2007 to 2008, "My expectation is that [print ad sales in 2009] will hold firm and be consistent with last year. The early indication is that is the way it is trending," Sawyer said. [see update below]

Part of the reason for that optimism is that college students read their campus newspaper in astounding percentages, according to an Alloy study released last summer.

Industries that have remained strong spenders in the college newspaper market include two of the industries that have been under increasing economic woes: banking and automobiles. Both industries focus on college students to bring in new customers, Sawyer said. One industry that has softened its spending on national ad buys has been insurance.

But national advertising was only one part of the picture. There's also campus advertising and local advertising. (Campus advertising consists of ads and announcements placed by college departments and associations.) As states begin cutting their education budgets, the money tightens downstream. You can see where this is heading. As departments cut budgets, they "often find advertising an easy area to trim or eliminate," Jacobs said.

And then there are local advertisers. Jacobs and Peter Waack, general manager at the Daily Orange at Syracuse University, both reported that local advertising had been strong throughout the fall, but Jacobs predicts further pain as local companies begin to feel the pinch. "As we go through the winter and spring of 2009, I think many college papers will experience local advertising declines. How severe is yet to be seen," he said.

But the evidence for that forecast is still not conclusive. Waack notes that local advertising is up for the year at the Daily Orange, by 15 percent from last year. Other newspaper managers report some increases as well.

Cutting Costs

One way that college papers deal with declining revenue is to cut the number of days the paper prints. At least two college dailies cut a publication day last fall -- the Daily Orange at Syracuse University and the Daily Californian at the University of California at Berkeley. Ohio State University cut summer publications this year as well, and the Daily at the University of Minnesota is the latest to cut a publication day.

Now, the Daily Texan is looking at possibly selling its presses, and other papers are talking about pay cuts, hiring freezes, and other belt-tightening measures. Even the Daily Eastern News, where I advise the online site, has seen a five-figure decrease in advertising this year. Interestingly, as advertisers have decreased display ads, they've increased classified advertising. Go figure.

For Waack at the Daily Orange, the publication cut has been a boon. The move hasn't affected ad sales, but it has "saved us quite a bit in printing, payroll, and distribution costs," he said. They still print "sports extras" on 10 Fridays of the year.

Alloy's Sawyer said dropping Friday publications doesn't have an impact on national ad sales pitches, as college schedules have changed over the years. More colleges have Monday-Wednesday/Tuesday-Thursday schedules. Friday readership is lowest of the weekdays, Sawyer said.

"Generally, we wouldn't buy Friday," he told me. "We would somewhat recommend against it. We generally steer a little clear of Monday. Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday are prime days. Thursday generally has an entertainment skew to it."

And then there is the issue of student funds. Many college newspapers receive "subscription fees" or subsidies from their university to provide free papers to the campus community. The Daily Nebraskan just fought for an increase in subsidies, and others will likely struggle to keep that funding source in the near future.

Jacobs noted that paper prices have been increasing, even as demand has decreased. Even if a student publication is totally supported by student fees (as was the Skyliner at North Greenville University, where I was the adviser for five years), that's going to impact the bottom line.

But what about online?

Online advertising doesn't yet make up a significant part of college media advertising. As I wrote earlier this year, it's an estimated 1-2 percent of total revenue for many college media outlets -- if that.

The reliance on local businesses may be part of the reason. "Web ads are a very tough sell to local businesses," Waack said.

So far, Waack says online isn't replacing the Friday paper, simply because students aren't the main audience for online content at the Daily Orange.

"Students read the print edition, not the online edition anyway," he told me. "Online is for parents, alumni, sports fans not in our distribution area for the most part, so they would not be reading the print edition."

But that outlook doesn't mean the staff isn't creating more online content. "Yes, we now have video stories, more blogs, and online-only content on Friday," Waack said. Both the Daily Cal and the Daily at UM have pledged to increase their online presence on days when they aren't publishing.

Sawyer sees the same thing: "Online college newspaper readership hasn't really been proven to me that it is a college student. There's just enough issues with it that we haven't actually sold (online). We continue to point out that the print edition is read, it's tangible, it's effective -- it's all of those things, so we aggressively sell the print edition of the paper."

To help sway more national advertisers to the college market, Alloy partnered with College Newspaper Business and Advertising Managers last year to create a "power buy" option that would provide discounts to print advertisers who bought across the network. Sawyer said they hope to roll out the "power buy" this fall. The hope is that a different pitch will sway clients to buy more print ads.

John Scholz, general manager at the UM Daily, pledged that in a letter to clients when UM announced the publication change. The four-day print publication would:

transition to a three (3) day online weekend package (www.mndaily.com) that will highlight University Sports as well as local Arts & Entertainment happenings. Since many students do not schedule classes on Friday and access our news on the web, we have decided to cut this day out of our publication calendar.

On Jan. 23, UM Daily editor Vadim Lavrusik expanded on that explanation:

The edition is set to go in place starting next weekend with live sports updates, stories and scores on our home page. Sports reporters will be updating live from the games. And if you are interested to get a score update, you no longer have to try to track it down on ESPN or another source. University students will be able to find it easily on mndaily.com.

Hope and innovation?

As college newspapers -- and other college media outlets -- deal with the tough economic times, it's important that they keep online at the fore. It's encouraging that the dailies who have cut a publication day have shifted their newsgathering efforts to the web when the presses aren't running, but if advertising doesn't pull along in the effort, the solution is going to be slow in coming.

The challenge is selling ads and also driving students, rather than just alumni, to the website. So far, the major effort to drive advertisers to the web has been through guides, while the major effort to drive students (and others) to the website has been through databases. Let's look at those two efforts:

Guides: A number of college newspapers have had success by the adding housing, restaurant, and bar guides to their websites. The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill spent money this year to develop an online housing guide, Heelshousing.com, which general manager Kevin Schwarz has said has attracted advertisers to the website. [see update below] The Indiana Daily Student has had a dining guide for some time as well.

Databases: Salary databases appear to be a popular attraction for readers of college newspaper websites. Here's one from the Virginia Tech Collegiate Times that lists the salaries of various university personnel. Similarly, crime databases or maps, like this from the Collegiate Times or this from the Daily Eastern News, are among the parts of an online site that generate the most traffic.

Live blogging, increased use of multimedia, and frequent updates may eventually drive students to college media websites in greater numbers, but for now, print remains at the forefront. Of particular concern to advisers I spoke with, including Waack, was the impact of the economic downturn on traditional media. Will college newspapers be able to recruit students in the future as the newspaper industry sheds jobs? Good question, and perhaps a topic for a future post.

But will innovation be driven by the economy? Probably not, says Jacobs. The Daily Pennsylvanian has been trying to develop its web presence for a long time, including the recent launch of an entertainment website at 34st.com.

"We, like most college dailies, have a long way to go to create websites which will be 'must read' attractions for students who already read our printed edition," he said. "And we must make no mistake about the fact that print advertising is still more compelling to readers, more effective for advertisers, and more profitable to newspapers than anything we are yet capable of doing online. Until someone demonstrates how to replicate the effectiveness of multiple full-page newspaper ads on our website, and until we see that readers are no longer picking up our newspaper, our primary focus will remain on the print edition. Will we continue to try new things online? Absolutely. Will it be driven by the weak economy? Probably not."

Further Reading

Hard data on college newspaper trends is difficult to come by. Unlike the Newspaper Association of America, there is no nationwide clearinghouse of data about college newspapers and their economic situation. Instead, there is anecdotal data from listservs like those run by College Media Advisers, Inc. and the College Newspaper Business and Advertising Managers and from various news reports. This makes it very difficult to track the real impact of economic distress on the college media market, although I suspect we'll see continuing details emerge over the next year.

For more information about the effects of the economy on college newspapers, see:

Money woes hit campus (SPLC)

Print journalism squeeze hits campus (InsideHigherEd)

Fewer ad sales lead to lighter newspaper at U. Nebraska (UWire)

Contribute

Please check back for further updates and potential future posts about this topic. In the meantime, I encourage you to chime in through the comments with innovative ways your college media outlet is generating revenue -- either through print or online. How are your ad reps succeeding at increasing online sales? How are you "tightening the belt" while times are tough?

UPDATE [1/28/09]: Kevin Schwartz gives further information about heelshousing.com. They expect to make $40,000 in its first year of operation, after spending $30,000 to develop the site. "I had initially hoped just to break even on the ROI in three years," he told me.

UPDATE 2 [1/28/09]: Andrew O'Dell, general manager of Student Life, the newspaper at Washington University in St. Louis makes a good point about how Alloy can project a flat 2009 while individual newspapers can be down in national advertising overall. In 2008, Student Life saw an increase in revenue from Alloy, but a decrease in overall national advertising, since national ads come from a variety of ad agencies. "Calendar year 2008 versus 2007 we were up 8.5% from Alloy, down 1.1% overall nationally. Fall 2008 versus 2007 we were up 40% from Alloy, down 4.7% overall nationally," he said.

Bryan Murley is assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University, where he advises DENnews.com, the Pacemaker-winning online site for the student newspaper. He is also the director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, where he leads the weblog Innovation in College Media. He is the college media correspondent for MediaShift.

I was prompted to reflect on this last month, after reading Going Digital, an Inside Higher Ed article by Brian Farkas, editor of the Vassar Miscellany News.

Farkas writes:

With our new Web site, http://miscellanynews.com/, we have now entered into the next generation of online journalism. And, for better or worse, we have become one of the few colleges in the country to do so. On our new site, reporters can contribute live blogs, attach videos and other multimedia to their articles, and display high-resolution photography in a way that our print publication never could. Best of all, The Miscellany's site is flexible, no longer burdened with the stagnant design so common among news sites in the 1990s. We have become one of only a handful of college newspapers in the country, along with The Yale Daily News and The Swarthmore Phoenix, to adopt a Web 2.0 approach and craft our site using up-to-date CSS and XML standards.

Farkas' description is overly pessimistic. Despite his negative outlook, college newspapers across the country are still moving forward with online content. Their innovations have been visible over the past few years -- especially when you consider how difficult it is for them to change.

Resistance to Change

When I first began blogging about online college media three years ago, most websites were little more than shovelware, with print editors and some advisers reluctant to invest time and energy in developing a robust web presence.

Some of that resistance was based in tradition: It's hard to steer a 100-year-old institution in a new direction. Production workflows had developed and been set like clockwork. Each new generation of editors and reporters walked in the footsteps of the previous generation, and learned their ways. The website was appended to the end of the workflow, after pages were sent to the press. Blowing up that workflow is not easy.

Still more resistance was cultural. Print journalists saw themselves as newspaper journalists first. The battles over whether blogging could be journalism were still being fought. Copy editor Greg Finley of the Orion at California State-Chico argued in 2006 that newspapers should keep their content offline, saying "No other medium can match newspapers' depth."

And another hurdle was technological: Inexpensive, easy-to-use tools for online storytelling were just coming into widespread use, and broadband Internet access was not nearly as widespread as it is today.

That resistance has faded over time, especially as the news industry has struggled to reinvent itself.

But that doesn't mean it's been easy. Even now, I find community college newspapers that still have no web presence. Bob Bergland, a professor at Missouri Western State University, found that 36% of a random sample of college newspapers had no web presence at all. (Bergland's findings are not yet available online, but I'll update this post as soon as they are available.)

Large daily university papers struggle to make money from their websites, and campus readership of the printed product remains high compared to industry standards, which leads to a conundrum: whether to devote resources to a website when the print product is still so popular.

And online efforts ebb and flow with staff changes as student journalists graduate and new ones take their place. One year, a paper hires a whiz-bang web designer who beefs up their online offerings. The next year, that designer is gone, and a less-savvy replacement can't keep up the pace. One year's multimedia journalist gives way to the next year's more traditional print journalist.

Blazing New Trails

Despite all these obstacles, many college newspapers have moved forward with innovative online offerings. Here are a few examples of sites that have paved the way in blogging, video, audio slideshows, and other forms of interactivity:

San Francisco State University Xpress -- Former SFSU journalism professor Andrew DeVigal, now multimedia editor for the New York Times, helped lead the Xpress staff in producing a multimedia-rich web site using Movable Type blogging software. Flash-based maps and audio slideshows (like this package that illustrates favorite student hangouts at SFSU) began on the Xpress site in 2006.

Vanderbilt University InsideVandy -- Chris Carroll, Vanderbilt student media adviser and co-founder of the Center for Innovation in College Media, led InsideVandy student journalists in an effort to create a "mothership" approach to student media, akin to Steve Yelvington's BlufftonToday in 2006. The idea was to bring all student media -- TV, radio, newspaper, and magazines -- into one online presence that would allow anyone in the community to contribute content.

Virginia Tech Collegiate Times -- The Collegiate Times became an example of both breaking news and multimedia usage in the aftermath of the April 16, 2007, massacre on campus. Student journalists posted breaking news updates, a blog, audio slideshows and video (see the CT archives here). More than that, other school newspapers also used online media to report on the shootings, posting video reports from their campuses and posting blog updates from Virginia (see continuing ICM coverage here).

University of Washington Daily -- Just days before the VT shootings, UW's student journalists covered the death of a student on campus, using video and live updates to tell the story (archived story here). The Daily began shooting video news on campus in the 2006-07 school year.

San Jose State University Spartan Daily -- With Ryan Sholin as web editor, the Spartan Daily plunged into multimedia early. See this example, a 2006 story about SJSU boxing club members traveling to Berkeley to compete in a regional boxing tournament. In addition to text, the article features video and audio slideshows. The paper has continued to push the envelope, in March 2008 experimenting with live streaming TV and live blogging.

Boise State University Arbiter -- The Arbiter dove headfirst into web-first publishing when the Broncos went to the Fiesta Bowl in 2006. Since the Arbiter wasn't publishing during the Christmas break, they made the most of their online presence. Staffers from the student newspaper published web-only content from Arizona, including podcasts, video and audio slideshows (see their coverage here). They have continued to produce podcasts and other multimedia coverage since then.

Eastern Illinois University Daily Eastern News -- Long before I was hired at Eastern, the DEN was producing audio slideshows using Soundslides that rivaled the best in the business. Check out this audio slideshow from the 2006 Greek Week Tugs competition. They were also early to experiment with podcasts and, in 2006, revamped their sports coverage by introducing a widget that could automatically update football scores and schedule information for readers.

This is just a small sampling of the ways that students have taken advantage of online tools since late 2005. There are numerous other schools that have also moved into multimedia and online publishing with gusto, including the Daily Tar Heel at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Daily Collegian at Penn State, the Daily Pennsylvanian at Penn, the GW Hatchet at George Washington U., the Miami Hurricane, the Independent Florida Alligator at the University of Florida, the Corsair at Pensacola Junior College, the Gargoyle at Flagler College, the Daily Mississippian at Ole Miss, and numerous others. For more examples of student journalists' multimedia, see this database.

Recently, we saw clear evidence of this movement into online journalism on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008, when student journalists across the country used tools like Mogulus, Twitter and CoverItLive to cover the historic election night. (For a sampling of coverage, see here).

To borrow a phrase, "You've come a long way, baby."

Bryan Murley is assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University, where he advises DENnews.com, the online site for the student newspaper. He is also the director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, where he leads the weblog Innovation in College Media. He is the college media correspondent for MediaShift.