This guest post is both an update on our previous coverage of Connect2Mason and the first in our new series about innovative models of interest to college media sites.
George Mason University has an interesting community; with many of the students living off-campus or attending classes at one of the four satellite campuses, finding a way to reach out to and work with them can be difficult. We are always looking at what’s going on online to figure out which tools can help us best.
With that in mind, we’ve launched two websites, Mason Votes and onMason, in the past year and a half. We’re also in the midst of a second redesign of Connect2Mason, our convergence website which pulls content from all of our other student media outlets. We’ve also been pretty serious about expanding our social media presence to cover the needs of our diverse community.
onMason
At the beginning of this semester we launched a new site called onMason. During the last two years, we’ve noticed that a lot of students are out there, blogging, sending pictures from their phones to the web and creating websites. We felt that we were missing a serious opportunity to bring student-created media to the forefront because, even though we run searches, there’s always going to be a huge amount of stuff we’re going to miss.
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
Now that we’ve shared a few our our ideas, let’s see yours! With the above video in mind, put the information into action. In the upcoming weeks:
Week 1: Plan a brainstorming session. It can be in your newsroom or on a camping trip or at an editor’s house. Make it fun and have lots of food. Make a list of all of the best ideas for how you can better implement the Web in your newsroom. It’s important that everyone is involved in the process.
Specifically, figure out how to (1) Start a Web-first workflow for all articles to be posted in a 24-hour news cycle, and (2) Generate Web-specific content like videos, slideshows and Twitter/Facebook/SMS updates. You can start a staff blog this week and write your first post about the ideas you brainstormed.
Week 2: Help every editor and reporter set up Google alerts for their section or beat as well as create a Twitter account to reach out to readers. At every budget meeting, require an aspect of every article pitch be based on feedback from readers on the Web. Start to build a strong community with your audience online and make sure it’s a two-way dialogue.
If you already have a Twitter account, this can be the week when you set up a system for publishing your editorial calendar for public feedback.
Weeks 3-6: Get out of the habit of updating your site once a day after the newspaper is printing. This is a huge step, so you’ll have to start slow. During this week, try not to post your articles online at 10 p.m. See how early you can post everything (and subsequently tweet the headlines), then figure out how your staff needs to shift roles to have a continuous flow of news throughout the day. This could mean changing the hours of your copy editors, changing deadlines for reporters and training everyone how to use the CMS.
Week 6-9: Really take control of live and breaking coverage. This can be as simple as posting event recaps (e.g. sports games, debates, concerts) online within a few hours after they’re over, because that’s when people will be looking. During those same events, post pictures and tweets that your readers will be interested in, and make sure to keep an eye on feedback from your users too.
Do they have questions? “Is #46 on the bench?” “How many people are at the concert?” Answer those questions. For breaking news like fires, robberies or protests, post as much information as you can as soon as you can. If it’s incomplete, that’s OK — but be accurate. Post updates as you go. Be sure to tweet the information too.
Week 9-12: After your staff starts to get comfortable with the Web, take on a big project like creating a system for an open editorial calendar, a continually updated news wiki or an iPhone app for readers on the go. All of your projects will feed on the other skills you’ve acquired: covering breaking news, thinking Web-first and encouraging community involvement.
Last but not least, report back! Let your peers know how your experiment went and what lessons you learned.
I used to be skeptical of using Facebook as a means of marketing and branding. The problem was that I never had enough fans to really make my Facebook page functional.
A Fan Box widget fixed that problem. And it can do the same for you.
What is a Fan Box?
I first saw a Fan Box in use with the launch of StudLife.com and immediately knew I had to use it too. It’s a minimally customizable widget that you can throw into the sidebar or footer of your website.
Our choice of the best links of the week are now at the top of We Clicked On (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):
Facebook news application source code open to college news sites – NewsCloud has open sourced a Facebook application specifically for student news organizations. The application reportedly incentivizes activity around the news org’s content through a point system and rewards.
TWiT 197: Steal This Diploma – Jeff Jarvis joins Leo Leporte for a discussion on newspaper collusion, Google Wave, and education.
The Daily Tar Heel’s new social media policy – Sara Gregory, incoming Managing Editor for Online, lays out the DTH’s remarkably open and earnest social media policies for the coming year.
In my experience/opinion, the reality is that that most college news orgs publish about the same limited set of topics repeatedly, and that’s why the section model can make some sense. That’s not to say that tags shouldn’t be used; they definitely should, and virtually all college news sites could do a better job of integrating tags into their navigation and exploration flow.
On the wiki this week, Daniel edited the Edit Flow Page with the latest info on the project.
Assuming that your college newspaper is on Facebook as a professional page, there is a good chance it isn’t updated often or doesn’t have many “fans.” Why not?
The best way to get traffic to your site is from links, and if your Facebook page is used correctly it can bring a great amount of traffic to your site.
Here are my top 10 ways to make sure that your Facebook Page doesn’t get overlooked:
1. Use RSS Feeds. It will be a great load off your shoulders to know that every time a new article is put up on your site, it will appear automatically on your Facebook Page. You can bring RSS feeds to your page by do adding Applications in the edit area of your page. The one I recommend is Simply RSS. It’s quite reliable and does the job well.
2. Use the Status Feature. Since the redesign, Facebook now has given Pages the opportunity to update their Fans without having to flood them (the old Facebook page’s version of statuses that went into their own separate inbox which often became overwhelming). Since the newest version of Pages include statuses, you can update your fans that will appear in their News Feed, which will make your publication’s Facebook page that much more visible than before.
3. Update Your Fans. The feature from the old version of Facebook pages can still be effective, so don’t overlook it. Some Facebook users have a tendency to ignore updates when they are sent to them but not all. Updates also allow you longer form communication with your Fans.
4. Use multimedia to make your Facebook a mini website. Consider putting the main slideshows and videos you put on your Web site onto your Facebook Page too. This content can then enter your Fans’ News Feeds. The NY Times’ Facebook Page is a good examples of this.
One of her ideas is to the make the podcast more participatory, possibly by using BlogTalkRadio, recording live shows and allowing listeners to “call in” with questions and comments. This idea goes along nicely with Daniel’s goal of making the podcasts more like a discussion than an interview.
Some background on Emily:
Emily is a junior studying journalism at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. She currently serves as the managing editor and Web editor for The Whit. In her role, Emily led the staff in incorporating more multimedia tools after The Whit transitioned to WordPress as CoPress’s first client. Outside of journalism, Emily enjoys traveling and listening to music.
From her experience at The Whit to her awesome blog, we’ve known for awhile that Emily would make a great addition to the team and we’re thrilled to have her on board.
And, just to leave a teaser, we’re looking to add another new team member in the next couple months. Stay tuned…
E-mail Emily at emily [at] copress [dot] org or follow her on Twitter: @emilykostic.
Words of warning. The following post is hotly contested internally among us CoPress folk. Very likely this is controversial to the greater community as well. But at the risk of having people with pitchforks or angry twitterers show up at my door, I’ll go ahead and share my opinion.
I’d like to propose a simple rule:
Tags should never contain a proper noun.
This is a maxim is intended to avoid frustration from both users and content creators by implementing tags in a useful way.
Tags are the darling child of the social networking, web 2.0 community. The concept is simple really: words or short phrases that, as metadata, can be attached to anything on the web to enable easier searching, better SEO, and greater user ease of use. But, when misused they become overwhelming, hard to use and irrelevant.
Here’s the logic behind the rule to never put a proper noun in a tag: the term you’re entering is likely already in the article and therefore searchable. If it’s already there, then putting it into the tags is not only a repeated, wasted effort, but it is going to confuse the reader by culttering up the tag cloud.
Wasted effort. If you’ve already put the proper noun in the article than the information is already there. Likewise for photos, the information should already be in the caption. Why would you spend the extra time trying to get the information in two places?
You’re giving the reader too much info to sort through. A ton of information is good for computers, but if you want tags to be user-friendly (often the argument for putting proper nouns into the tag cloud), you need to limit what you choose to use.
The whole post is already searchable. If you’ve got the person’s name or the place in the article, caption, description, whatever it is you’re writing, the data is searchable. Tags are there to add additional information that you couldn’t writing directly into the post.
There’s no way you’re going to be able to remember every single proper noun that could possibly be affected. Let the semantic web (when it finally comes about) take care of that for you.
What should be tagged
Tags are meant to be used for conceptual information that you would never write in the post, but you’d like to attach to your data. Read more →
Or at least that was the thinking at newspapers several years ago. Now that blogging has gained at least tacit acceptance among “true” journalists, newsrooms are encountering the very two same problems that have plagued bloggers since the dawn of… blogging: consistently producing good content, and getting that content the exposure it deserves.
The good news, however, is that creating content comes relatively easy for journalists who are already used to having to meet a daily deadline. Once they accept the idea that a blog can be true journalism, they can adapt it as a less formal news article, a summary of their notes, sharing of a pitch that didn’t work out, a conversation with their readers, a series of relevant thoughts, or whatever gets ‘em blogging; most journalists seem to take to the new tool with gusto.
Now, some strategies for getting readers engaged. Read more →
Assuming that your college newspaper is on 
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