@Daniel You make some excellent points. By no means did we do this in the best way and looking back I do wish that I had created more of a Facebook presence for the paper before getting us on Twitter, but oh well. That said, we’ve got some stuff in the works that will fix that. A Facebook page will be launching soon and I’m toying around with trying to do an iPhone app this summer. Time will tell, but it should be fun.

The result? I’m in our student center looking at a news van, with state troopers walking around the venue across the street. The event is being held in a small venue, and we were only able to secure 4 press passes, which we have 3 journalists and a photographer covering. Outside, where we expect protests, we’re have four (or more) staff, including two photographers. And then there’s me… I’m going to be using CoverItLive to publish what’s going on.

CoverItLive is an awesome platform, and if you haven’t heard of it, check it out. It’s completely free and has tons of features for doing live coverage. This will be my first time using it tonight, but I’ve used the “practice session” feature a few times to test it out. It even has a feature to allow a few people’s twitters to show up (I think it’s up to 12 people & 6 #hashtags). I thought of maybe using this so the journalists inside the venue could text to twitter and have their info appear immediately on the live coverage… I still have a few hours left to explore this, but I think I’ll have them text me so I can type it up (and fix and spelling/grammer).

I think CoverItLive would also be good for breaking news that’s unexpected- it allows for multiple “producers” to post. This could be used in a lockdown-type of situation where journalists are located all over, and each have a different story to tell.

I’m very… eh about twitter. If anyone caught the latest South Park, twitter is like “The Coon” – hopefully someone gets that. If not.. I think twitter is cool and all, but it’s all hype to me. Is it a neat service? Sure. Is it for me? Nope. For my peers? Doubt it. Sure all those “New Media” and “cool” people might be using it, but it’s not the next big thing… it’s just a niche market. I don’t see my campus of 8,000 becoming a twittering campus anytime soon. Heck, I think more people [in the General Public] know about WordPress than they do twitter.

…and I think I’ll just stop there.

First, I think your assessment of Twitter is almost there. It’s all about meeting your audience on the ground that they’re most comfortable participating in. I don’t think the Whitman campus is there in their adoption of Twitter, and might never be, but there is the possibility that more people will use it in the future. They just haven’t figured out how to use it to find the best parties on Friday night

Second, I’m not sure that a forum will solve all of your problems. It will offer a bit different format for discussion than a blog post but both tools won’t be good unless they’re used effectively. In the forum, I might post several of the broad questions raised in the administration’s decision to cut funding to the team. This would offer a venue for people to weigh in with that they think the answer should be. I would then use the blog to offer a daily synthesis of what the discussion is, as well as to introduce more of the background facts that your reporters are pulling together.

All of this being said, I think you guys did a stellar job breaking out of the weekly print mindset and adopting web tools to enhance conversation.