This week’s guests:

Mindy McAdams (@macloo) is the Knight Chair for Journalism Technologies and the Democratic Process at the University of Florida and the author of Flash Journalism. Mindy is known for online journalism, by way of her blog (Teaching Online Journalism) and her open-source teaching style.

Rich Beckman (@richbeckman) is the Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile. Rich is known for multimedia projects and for training students with high-end skills.

A few of the topics from this week’s podcast are:

• How college media organizations can innovate and improve their Web sites
• Comments on college media
• What each professor would do if they were the editor of a college news organization today
• Increasing online and in-person engagement
• Pros and cons of high staff turnover
• Changing and sustaining newsroom cultures

Rich and Mindy on ‘the state of college media’ online

Mindy said the biggest problem facing college media is that students mirror the professional industry with their “abysmal” handling of revenue:

“They don’t understand Web advertising. They don’t understand placement of advertising. They don’t understand how to communicate about that advertising with the people who buy it, their advertisers.”

Rich looked more at content than business in his analysis of the state of college media. He said to look for strong examples of multimedia at big news orgs like MSNBC and The New York Times:

“[Students] scoff at that and say, ‘Well we don’t have those kind of budgets and we don’t have those kinds of skills.’ And my answer was simply, ‘Well, they (The New York Times and MSNBC) don’t have the kind of time that you have. And they don’t have the ability to work in teams like you have and they don’t have the ability to get feedback like you have from your professors.”

Listen to the full podcast here: