CoPress

The Center for College Media is hosting a student media online journalism contest. This contest leaves no stone unturned as it is likely the most extensive contest for online student journalists and college media.

The entry fee is $30 per college media (TV, Radio, Online-only, Newspaper — you’re all welcome to enter!) The fee covers two entries per category per outlet. (It even includes one freebie.)

Of the contest Bryan Murley, an Assistant Professor of New and Emerging Media at Eastern Illinois University, said via email, “This is the only contest that recognizes specific efforts by college media outlets. It’s not some ‘general’ online award, but an award that recognizes specific things that each college media outlet has done. No ‘student’ awards for class projects. Only real efforts for college media outlets are applicable. It’s not only a contest to recognize what’s been achieved, but what college media should aspire to.”

Among the unique categories students can enter are Web Editor of the Year, Best Use of Data, Best Online Workflow, Best Community Engagement, and Best Mashup.

Interested news organizations can apply online by May 16, and winners will be announced in the fall.

We’re starting a new regular Friday feature here at CoPress called We Clicked On. It’s going to be a round-up of activity on the website, news from the Network, and other links of interest in the past week. If you’re interested in contributing, join our Newsgroup on Publish2, save links with “for:copress” in delicious, or email us with the link and your take (we’ll be using that to craft the crafty commentary). The round-up will evolve as time goes on and, as always, we’d enjoy your feedback on what works and what needs to be improved.

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.