Innovation in College Media

Via Christina Drain at Pensacola Junior College, I read that Brian Gardner, creator of the popular premium Revolution themes, is changing the model for Revolution as of Nov. 1. After that, all Revolution themes will be open-sourced. Those who purchased the earlier Revolution themes will have exclusive access to them.

There will be a new set of themes on that website, which like I said will be made available under the GPL license. There will be an option to purchase packages which include support, tutorials, access to customization and a few other things.

I do want to point out, as promised to users who’ve previously purchased the current Revolution themes, that there will be a section in the new support forum where we will continue to support those themes.

This should be an interesting development, and might push more college newspapers into the arms of WordPress.

Last week, it was the Daily Mississippian bringing the hardcore debate coverage. This week, it’s Student Life at Washington University trying to keep the web site focused for the vice presidential debate. General Manager Andy O’Dell says the students plan “Live blogging, video, photos, slideshows, interviews, etc.” updated throughout the day.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Alfred Hermida, blogging at PBS’ MediaShift, has a series of video interviews with industry leaders about what journalism students will need to know for the future. Go watch. (via Len Witt)

Image via WikipediaTomorrow, I’m flying to Pittsburgh to do some multimedia training for the editors and staff of the Pitt News at the University of Pittsburgh. We’ll be training on audio gathering and editing, video gathering and editing, and some other online tools journalists can use to beef up their web presence. It’s similar to the workshops I’ve done at University of Nebraska, New Mexico State and what we’ve done in the CICM workshops. The Pitt News is one of the papers already on College Publisher 5, so I’ll be curious to hear how the staff is adapting.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I’m sure this has been covered everywhere (I even heard it on NPR yesterday afternoon), but here’s information about the Chicago Tribune’s new redesign. See this previous post for Chuck Burke’s discussion of some of the thinking behind the effort.

Personally, I like the use of larger photographs and the redesigned nameplate. Do I think it will reduce declining circulation? Redesigns don’t usually do that.

One question I asked Burke after his presentation was about the design of the inside pages. How much would those designs change. He mentioned that the Trib is making a conscious effort to train inside page designers on the new design ideas so that the changes are obvious there, as well as on the section fronts.

The Tribune is planning a redesign of the website as well, Burke said, but they didn’t want to get bogged down in two redesigns at once.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeVia the New York Times:

The New York Sun, the six-year-old newspaper with a conservative mind-set, announced on Monday that it would close after publishing Tuesday’s issue.

The Sun had 110 employees, who will apparently receive paychecks through November. The Sun did a major web site redesign in March. Apparently it didn’t help their bottom line enough.

Here’s the Sun’s story on the closing. The paper was known for a conservative political stance.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Image via WikipediaFor a long time, I labored under the impression that the ability to extract audio from a video clip was non-existent in iMovie ‘08. Turns out, that’s not the case. There’s a way to do it, but it’s less straightforward than in iMovie HD. Colleague Doug Lawhead turned me on to this relatively simple explanation of the process.

I still dislike the interface, but iMovie HD is buggy and not being upgraded. I’m using iMovie ‘08 in the beginning multimedia class for the first time. We’ll probably be moving to Final Cut Express for our classes in the future.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

A few weeks ago, a group of college news web editors and a couple of advisers got together to discuss content management systems. The result is CoPress.

From the about page:

Student newspapers, at colleges and universities, fare no better than the pros. In fact, they’re generally worse off. Few student publications have much technical talent at all on staff, and what they do have is spread very thin. Most are stuck with bad content management systems — either clunky commercial products or simple blogging tools — that take much hacking and “programming” to fit the complex needs of a modern news Web site. As a result, developers spend inordinate effort fighting their CMSes, leaving minimal time to innovate on top of the platforms or build engaging online material. To date, most publications have struggled individually to reinvent the wheel.

They’re trying to reinvent the wheel with a new cms. Per the comments, Daniel Bachhuber points out that they’re not developing a new cms, but trying to  gather info to make an informed decision on a cms. Read his comment for more explanation. That’s a tall order, but it’s an interesting development that sprung from the ground up.

They are in the process of collecting data from a survey of college newspaper web sites. Be sure and contribute to the data set if you are an adviser or an editor for your college newspaper. Follow the developments on the web site.

For those with an interest in college media advising, the College Media Advisers web site has been upgraded. The new site is run on Drupal, upgraded from Joomla, which I helped transition the site from a College Publisher site in 2005. Click below for the new features. Many of these features were discussed when we moved off CP, but we didn’t have the resources to add them until CMA hired Bill Neville part-time to do web site development. (via Neville to the CMA listserv)

Continue reading →

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite