From linking out and social media to video and liveblogging, student journalists often hear advice about steps their individual news organizations should take to succeed today. But we often neglect to take a step back and consider different models from which college media can draw inspiration.

So, we’d like to examine those with some depth in a new series, offering a different twist on the usual coverage. Specifically, focusing on news sites that began online. There’s a ton of great work being done online by print publications across the country, which we often cover, and this series is intended to help everyone.

Why this approach? Because good things can come when your news organization thinks like a startup. Also, these sites are unencumbered by legacy costs or structures related to a long-standing print publication.

We already know of a few good examples within college media:

• NYU Local — an independent site at New York University
• Amherst Wire — a magazine-style site at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst
• Connect2Mason — a convergence site that partners with existing college media on campus
• The Bwog — a blog run by the undergraduate magazine staff at Columbia University
• Onward State — a blog covering the Penn State community
• Daily Colonial — online daily news site for George Washington University and the surrounding areas

And even some outliers like The Daily Gazette, a daily news site at Swarthmore College that started as online-only and then added a print edition.

The most well-known of these sites is probably NYU Local, which has been covered by MediaShift and College Media Matters, the latter of which profiled founder Cody Brown. It’s even been linked to by The New York Times. Previously, CoPress spoke with Cody and Miles Skorpen, a CoPress team member then of The Daily Gazette, about online-only student news organizations last year.

We’ve also spoken with Jackie Hai and Richard Caesar of the Amherst Wire for a podcast (Jackie wrote a post about their economic stimulus coverage) and Whitney Rhodes, founding director of Connect2Mason, on a different podcast.

If you know of other good examples, drop us a link in the comments and let us know why they’re interesting — we’d probably like to talk with them. We’re particularly interested in student-created, student-run college news sites (i.e. not ones under the university or j-school).

Basically, we’re looking to write in more depth about startup, blog-style and other models of interest to college media — both at the college and professional levels. Also, we’d be open to submissions for posts, as always.

With these posts, we hope to offer lessons and advice that all college news organizations find useful and, perhaps, provide ideas to inspire others to start similar sites.

I’ve already started drafting a post about the Texas Tribune‘s model; until then, check out this interview with one of their developers. I also have ideas swirling in my head after attending the New Media Women Entrepreneurs Summit last Monday. Stay tuned!

If you’re not familiar with Jackie and the work of the Amherst Wire then it’s definitely worth checking out the work they have done for special features.

Several of the points that came out of the session that are worth repeating:

• Plan in advance: From creating wireframes to deciding what you’re going to include it’s important to start from a solid base to prevent headaches down the road.
• Keep the design fresh: If your news organization is going to go through the effort of producing special content then make the online presentation reflective of how much work went into the section. Don’t just recycle a traditional story template; create something that highlights the content and topic of the feature. Think of feature sections as a way for your online staff to showcase what they can do.
• Showcase what’s important: If you’re producing multimedia content along with print stories for your feature make sure you emphasize these in an attractive way. Simply providing links to videos, photo galleries, interviews, etc. is not enough. Frequently multimedia aspects are the most eye-catching aspects of a story so it doesn’t serve your news organization very well to hide them away behind simple text links.
• Bring in extras: If you’re working at a small news organization and covering a much larger story don’t feel like you have to cover every aspect of it in your feature. As the saying goes: do what you do best and link to the rest. This will allow your staff to focus their time and energy on producing and designing stellar content for what you can cover.

There’s much more in the session which is embedded above with all the audio as well so check that out.

The session concluded this summer’s Web Design Camp but there will most likely be a session toward the end of the summer that covers what people accomplished with their summer projects. While the sessions are over we are still here to answer any and all design-related questions that come up during your work. If you’re stuck and need help head over to the forum or shoot an email to us.

>Why deep-information journalism?

The Internet is awash with information that is, too frequently, miles wide and only inches deep. News organizations add to the problem when they bombard readers with commodity news (only the “facts and updates,” says the AP’s 2008 study on news consumption, as opposed to depth and breadth).

Deep-information journalism is one way to balance out shallow coverage by providing context, background and analysis for topical issues. BBC’s Special Reports accomplishes this with a clean design that encourages exploration. News wikis are another promising development that would achieve a similar goal if implemented well.

Economic Stimulus 101: The project

At the Amherst Wire, we wanted to turn an analytical lens on the federal economic stimulus bill that passed last month and capture various aspects of the questions and debates surrounding it. We also hoped to frame the topic in a broader context including historical parallels and general economic theory distilled into simple terms.

To do so, we interviewed six professors (five in economics and one in entrepreneurship) from UMass Amherst and Mt. Holyoke College, edited the videos into short clips, and arranged them by subject in an online guide.

1. Preparation

We did extensive research and planning before setting up the interviews so that we would know the right questions to ask. This was particularly important when tackling a topic as complex as the U.S. economy — we had a lot of ground to cover, but at the same time, didn’t want to stray too far afield.

During the preparatory stages, we compiled a FAQ about the stimulus package from students blogging for a journalism class. This gave us an idea of what college students were wondering about the bill and shaped some general themes that ended up in the final project.

2. In-person interviews

To land interviews with professors, we simply scanned department contact lists and sent e-mails to faculty whose areas of expertise lined up with our topic. Out of maybe twenty professors contacted, six replied saying they were interested. We sent our questions in advance to give them time to prepare, and then conducted the interviews in their offices over the course of two weeks.

Each interview lasted 30-45 minutes and covered areas the professor was most familiar with. We didn’t follow a strict Q&A format or ask the questions in any particular order, but let the interview unfold more like a discussion. We would be reorganizing everything in the editing room later, anyway.

3. Video editing

This was the most time-consuming part of the entire project. After capturing about 3.5 hours of raw footage in Final Cut Pro, it took approximately three all-night sessions between three people to cut the interviews into short clips for the web. The average length of each clip was 1-2 minutes, with no clip longer than 5 minutes. We intentionally kept the clips short and to the point, catering to the attention span of most web users.

Once exported, the clips were uploaded to Vimeo along with some basic metadata (professor and subject in the title, pull quote in the description). We chose Vimeo for their high video playback quality and because they have one of the cleanest embedded players around.

Around the same time we were cranking out video clips, I got started with designing the page layout.

4. Layout and design

I always begin my web design process with some sketches on paper. My first thought was to build something like a mindmap, grouping clips by topic and sub-topic in a nonlinear format.

But the information might be too hard to find that way. So we came up with a dashboard of sorts at the top of the page that would let users jump to the sections they’re interested in, using simple anchor links.

At this point, I usually open up Photoshop and start playing around with graphics, because once I have a banner in place, the rest of the page’s design and color scheme tends to fall into place.

The layout itself was hand-coded in CSS and HTML, using a single-column WordPress page template as the base. All editing was done from the WordPress admin panel, with copious amounts of page previews and refreshing to test the design before it went live.

5. Putting it all together

The final stage of the project was to plug all the videos into the page layout. This turned out to be easier said than done, as we ended up with more video clips than we knew what to do with.

Ultimately, we came up with a decidedly low-tech solution to organizing the 70+ clips into the proper categories and questions: cutting up little strips of paper, writing a clip’s title on each one, and moving them around on a table until every clip had a home in the final presentation.

From there, it was simply a matter of going from section to section, copying the embed codes from Vimeo into the source code and adding thumbnails and pull quotes.

We used the Shadowbox JS plugin, which supports multiple types of media, to achieve the lightbox effect for launching videos.

A note on usability

In the project’s initial release, the thumbnails were actually embedded videos that could be played on the page without needing to launch a full-size version. Vimeo’s elegantly designed video embed options made this possible, and we all agreed that this was a very cool thing to include.

Unfortunately, within hours after launch, we received reports that our feature was causing browsers to freeze up on slower computers. Loading dozens of embedded videos on one page was too resource-intensive for a large percentage of our audience, so we had to scale back to simple image thumbnails.

Lesson learned: usability and accessibility always trumps coolness factor. It’s a good thing to keep in mind for any multimedia journalism project on the web.

Around the Network

We kicked off a lively discussion in the forum on Monday asking, “What are your website goals for the rest of the semester?” A number of great ideas have surfaced from the community. Some highlights from Josh Halliday‘s response:

• Work on cross-promotion of our student-run University radio station – perhaps an app on the homepage, or even its own separate page?
• Print more posters for on-campus advertising/recruiting
• Greater attention to our online community – MORE CONVERSATION, perhaps recruit a ‘community manager’ to maintain Facebook page, Twitter account etc.

There were dozens of other goals posted, so be sure to take a look.

Also, on the forum, we have our first discussion in the WordPress section:

• Users: How to deal with them year-to-year?

Wiki-tastic

Not much to report here, so let’s change that for next week! We want you to help add to our knowledge, which is also YOUR knowledge base.

A couple quick notes:

• After discovering mass quantities of spam, we’ve decided to require a basic registration to edit the wiki – just so we can make sure everything is kosher.
• We’ve added the Simple Press plugin (which we use for our forum) to the appropriate page.

In the News

Four links you should have clicked on in the past week (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• San Francisco Post-Chronicle wiki – @alexismadrigal and @sarahrose have started planning for the new SF Chronicle.
• How college media uses Twitter – this follows a list of student media in the Twittersphere compiled by CICM. No surprise with the results: 40 percent of student media on Twitter has “mostly or entirely RSS feeds.” On the plus side, at least they know about RSS.
• Bring a professor chat wrap-up – from our good friends at CollegeJourn. Congrats on a successful event!
• Interview with Marc Andreessen on Charlie Rose - Marc says that newspapers should shut down their presses today. The whole video is worth watching.

And a bonus link:

• CSS presentation for online journalism – from the Amherst Wire, which is offering a series of workshops for staff.

Host:

Guests: Jackie Hai and Richard Caesar, editors of the Amherst Wire.

Summary: Bryan talks with Jackie and Richard about the Amherst Wire, how the project was started, how their website operates, and a recent UMass student media summit.

Links:

• Amherst Wire
• Market Meltdown 101
• Jackie Hai’s wrap-up of the UMass student media summit.

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Got feedback or ideas for an upcoming podcast? Let us know!

In the Community

We launched our first forum this week, asking about what is needed for student news organizations to collaborate. As of writing, Emily Ingram has been the only one to respond, but she offers good tips for what a collaborative platform might need: a place to crowdsource a solution for a particularly difficult problem, a source for tips and tricks that have worked for other young journalists, and a source of inspiration so we can stay innovative amid all the doom-and-gloom talk.

Our new wiki also saw the light of day this week with a number of excellent contributions, including two profile pages for student news organizations I hadn’t heard from before: The Snapper (running WordPress) and The Maneater (running Django). We’re very excited to have them in the community. There’s also a bunch of new WordPress themes listed if you’re looking for something to build from.

Around the Network

Jackie Hai, of the Amherst Wire, reports on a first-ever student media summit at UMass. The goal was to “have people from each group meet face-to-face and open up channels of communication, paving the way for a collaborative workflow in delivering a more unified news experience to readers and viewers” and it appears as though they’ve already found several ways to come together.

Bryan Murley at the Center for Innovation in College Media (CICM) has announced a pretty darn comprehensive college media contest. It’s all about online media, and he’s looking for the best examples of multimedia, use of data in reporting, and overall web presence, among other criteria.

Andrew Dunn has proposed a syllabus for studying news business models, and it has been pretty well received in the community. There’s talk of doing this completely online, which would be very cool.

The Whitman Pioneer, a weekly newspaper at Whitman College, has relaunched with a new WordPress theme for its website. Andrew Spittle, the new Web Manager, has more details on his blog.

Shameless plug. In response to a growing chorus of discontent about the Daily Emerald, I wrote a post about the steps they should take to regain trust and learn how to innovate. It’s all about transparency, and I think such transparency could lead to better buy-in from the community.