CoPress

This week, CoPress directors Daniel Bachhuber, Andrew Spittle, Lauren Rabaino and Adam Hemphill are attending the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas. These are reports from the field. For more updates, follow the conversation on Twitter.

Kristin Millis (University of Washington) and Jason Manning (Arizona State) shared ways to market your newspaper both online and offline.

A few things they’re doing to market themselves and make money:

• Build a full multimedia company and sell campaigns. Example: University of Washington charges to do “chalk on the ground” campaigns for $30/chalk
• UW Gave away 10k condoms when releasing their sex edition a week before Valentine’s Day
• Live tweeting, live video updates from sports events
• House ads in print product to promote their social media products
• Univ. of Washington charges thousands to do viral marketing videos (see example below)

Social media

Undoubtedly, social media is one of the strongest and easiest forms of marketing a college newsorg can do. A few tips:

• Don’t need official “Twitter staff,” but when posting to social media it’s important to be organized about it in breaking news situations
• Be personal about it. For example, if your newsroom holds a “pie week,” tweet, “What’s your favorite pie?” to loop your readers into newsroom happenings
• Do Facebook advertisements. They can be as cheap as $25 and give you the opportunity to bring more people in (plus, you can target it specifically at people from your university)
• Be on their minds all day, no shotgun effect
• Congratulate staff members who have won awards
• Don’t just put it on your newsorg newsfeed, but double post to your own newsfeed
• Ethical standards that apply to jour apply to social media realm