Website desserts

My last JACC blog entry talked about the need to add more than the normal story fare to our newspaper web sites to give our readers more reason to come to our sites. See "All meat and no potatoes, veggies and desserts."

In the post I alluded to the real problem with that idea: Our students are all so busy covering our campuses and learning new storytelling forms that none of them have time to create even more content. My post suggested that they seek other sources of content that can be pulled into our sites with little extra effort.

What you need to do is look for tools like Google Gadgets. These free add-ons cover a lot of possibilities. I use them on the JACC site for the search function and for the RSS feeds for the JACC blog and the "JACC in the News" features at the bottom of the front page.

Here's another that you might want to add to your college publication sites: Daily Comics. This Google gadget automatically pulls in more than 25 name brand comics to your web site each day. Once you set it up you can forget
about it.

If you'd like to see a sample of Daily Comics, look at the JACC web site.

Google gadgets require little or no HTML knowledge. Just go to the tool's web page or just go to Google Gadgets and do a search for "Daily Comics."

Click on the button called "Add to your web page." Set the parameters and copy the code. Paste the code into your web site and you're done.

With this gadget I recommend setting the width to 625 pixels and depth to 250. This will allow the whole comics to be seen without any scrolling.

For the two-thirds of the JACC schools that use College Publisher, here are some options for using the code. Those not using College Publisher could, of course, use the code on their sites in other ways, too.

• Paste the code into a regular story page. Set the story as a "rolling story" and use dates that will have the story staying live for, oh, two years. This will change, of course, for schools as they convert to the new CP tool.
  
  
• Create a special page, like I've done with the JACC example. To do this, go to the Presentation tab and choose the "Create Page" option. You can then create a front page link to this page. This, of course, requires just a bit of HTML savvy.
  
  
• Create an object with the "Page Designer" tool under the "Presentation" tab. Then the object can be place in various areas of the page, though the width will limit your options (see below).
  
  
• Again, go to the "Page Designer" tool and select "Bottom Object" from the pulldown menu and paste the code into the template code.

One problem with Daily Comics is that you have to make it about 650 pixels wide to show the whole comic, but the Main Content column of most of our College Publisher sites is only 48 pixels wide. So if you follow my instructions above, the page will get pushed out of shape a bit. See the JACC example and notice how the third column is shoved out to make room for the comics. The only option above that works without doing this is the "bottom object" option, though that might not be the most desirable option.

In coming weeks I'll share other ideas for "potatoes, veggies and desserts."

All meat and no potatoes, veggies or dessert

Robert Niles over at the Online Journalism Review is attending the "NewsTools 2008: Journalism that Matters" conference at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale this week and has an interesting blog item entitled "What's Wrong With Us?". One portion of his post really caught my attention. It's something I have written about before (my goodness, was it that long ago?) .

Niles says says:

As I discussed with several other conference participants over dinner, journalists need to treat their websites like a dinner party. You can't just dish out a plate of veggies. You need to invite your readers in, chat with them, serve 'em a drink and get them comfortable. Then you can start dishing out the food, including a main course, veggies and dessert.

and

It's a rare publication that rakes in the cash offering readers nothing but investigative pieces and serious, in-depth profiles. Even The New Yorker runs a hell of a lot of cartoons. Individual journalists may aspire to a career of hard-hitting reporting. But their companies also employ people who are shooting wild art at Little League games, publishing pages filled with comics and Sudoku, and running reader sweepstakes and giveaways.

If you're going to publish a website, you can't forget the gimmicks.

In looking at California community college online publications I seldom see much effort to go beyond the normal news fare that all ready shows up in print. We just don't do self-promotion well or play good party hosts. Below are some ideas. My apologies for such heavy use of the Cerritos College Talon Marks as an example. I do so not to brag on my own students' publication, but because it is the one with which I am most familiar. My (way) earlier post included some examples from other community college publications.

• MORE PHOTOS -- One of my biggest pet peeves is news web sites, especially major ones, is that they don't show enough photos. You don't need a photo slide show with every story, but come on, show me the scene. Print stories that have photos with them, or probably should, too often appear online without the photo sauce. Even my own students do a poor job of attaching photos to anything but those stories that need it for the front page featured story.
  
  
• LINKS TO OTHER STORIES -- Much has been written about this both here and in other blogs I regularly read, but our students still don't do it. It takes extra skill and extra work, but it can become habit if you work at it. Give your reader some spice with that meal.
  
  
• EXPLAIN THE NEWS WITH BLOGS -- Today we can do more than report the news, we can report about the news. And we can explain the news process to readers. How and why do we make decisions? This is one role of blogs. Your staff members should be learning to news blog on a regular basis. They will actually learn to understand the news better if they have to explain more than the details of a story, but how they got those details and what they mean. It is easy to write, but hard to get into the habit of writing regularly. They should be learning while in your programs. So few of our papers have blogs. And at those that do, so few blogs are updated on a regular basis. Tip: Don't hide blogs or blog entries. Tease them on the front page. Take a look at Google's Custom RSS gadget to automatically update headline links. If the same links stay there too long, it becomes conspicuous. See talonmarks.com or the JACC Web site for examples of this handy and free tool in use. What good is a great meal if you aren't ready to hand out recipies?
  
  
• CARTOONS AND PUZZLES -- Ahh, the sugary dessert of the meal. Ideally, you have your own cartoonist, but even if you don't you can find free or low cost syndicated cartoons and puzzles, some of which will update daily automatically. Give your readers extra reasons to stick around and enjoy your meal. If they just show up for dessert, perhaps they'll sample the meat and potatoes. Few JACC schools use cartoons and puzzles. And the ones that do make them difficult to access or even read online (make them bigger if necessary). I think this stems from a mistaken notion that everything on your Web site MUST be created by you. If you had a staff of 100, okay. But you don't. So if your staff cannot produce a balanced meal, have someone else cater part of it. I reluctantly can buy the "only our stuff" argument for the print edition, which has limited space to begin with, but online space is not a problem and you can and should provide a complete meal. For an example of what can be done, check out talonmarks.com's cartoon page. it and other cartoon and puzzle pages are teased at the bottom of the front page.
  
  
• PROMOTIONS -- Suppose you gave a dinner party and no one showed? Is your Web site like that? You are right to focus on quality content, but it doesn't matter if no one shows up to enjoy it. Promote the hell out of your site. Promote in your print edition AND on your online edition. You want to get readers back. You want to show them that they are appreciated. While few of us are actively recruiting readers/customers, remember that in business it is far easier/cheaper to keep a customer/subscriber than it is to get a new one. Spend a few bucks and give things away once in a while. The Cerritos Talon Marks, for instance, has given away iPods, concert tickets, tickets to wrestling matches and more to attract online readers and thank subscribers. Our most recent promotion was a team effort with Paramount Pictures and the Iron Man movie. While it was not a good experiment for us --see my other blog for details-- at least it was an attempt. We need to do more than we do, but I don't see much evidence of other publications doing anything.
  
  
• DIFFERENT WAYS OF TELLING STORIES -- Dinner is more than meat and potatoes cooked one way. Look for other ways of cooking foods/telling stories: Slide shows, videos, audio, pdf attachments, sprouts (not the Brussels kind), mashups and more. In JACC we know a lot more about Soundslides because of the Team feature contest we ran at our last convention, but there are lots of other tools. My most current favorite is Sprout Builder. My students produced their first sprout recently and already we see LOTS of uses for it. Be on the lookout for other exotic tools coming out. Not a gourmet chef? Take a quick look at services like Bravenet, which offers a host of free online tools for polls, forms, chat rooms, surveys and more that you can add to your site even if you don't have a tech wizard handy. There is no such thing as a completely free lunch and if you use these tools you have to put up with some distracting advertising. But if you like a tool, you can pay for it and lose the advertising. I know, that's hard to do on a fixed budget, but even meat can get dull after a while.
  

JACC schools, when you've prepared a particularly fine meal or dish, let me know and I'll unabashedly publicize it here for you. We all like a good meal and can learn from each other.

Wow! Sprout Builder looks neat

Bryan Murley just posted an entry on his Innovation in College Media blog about an interesting new web tool some of us should look at. If you like the ease of use of SoundSlides to add to presentation on your web sites, your students should also look at Sprout Builder at http://sproutbuilder.com.

Sprout Builder is "the quick and easy way for anyone to build, publish, and manage widgets, mini-sites, mashups, banners and more."

Basically, like SoundSlides, it creates a Flash presentation project for you without you having to learn how to use Flash. The difference here is that Sprout Builder's product is a multi-layered widget that can include video, audio, images and newsfeeds and choose from dozens of pre-built components and web services.

Once you create the product through the online site, copy the code and embed it into your web site.

How would you use this? Well, my beady little mind is just starting to turn this over, but the first project that comes to mind would be an interactive multimedia project for those community colleges going through the president hiring stages. Got three finalists? Include photos of them, videos of campus forums, biographies, resumes, etc.

Imagine what kind of package you could put together for a sports team? Photos, video, audio, stats of top athletes. Or build something that tells a bit about every team in an athletic conference.

Oooooo, just let me think a bit more. Nope. Have too many papers to grade first. M-u-s-t grade papers. Must n-o-t take time to be innovative.

Seriously, though, we've been talking about the next step in online publications to post first and publish later. If that is true, the step after that is to create original online content that blows print content out of the water. Tools like Soundslides and Sprout Builder can make you look like a pro without having to be a code junkie. You just have to be a good journalist.

JACC just introduced Team Feature 2.0 at its recent convention. TF2 is a contest that requires photographer and writer to work together to create a multimedia slide show feature story using SoundSlides. There is already talk about TF3: where still photos are replaced by video. With something like Sprout Builder, though, TF3 could instead leap frog into a true interactive online feature.

Whether to go online only

One thing I really like about Cypress College's Robert Mercer is that, if you'll give him the opportunity, he'll come up with questions that can really make you think.

On JACC's faculty-only listserve last week he did just that when he brought up a disagreement he is having with his program dean about the future of the Cypress College Chronicle newspaper, the print edition. Robert is really into online journalism and he's got a lot of right ideas about the future of journalism. He's at the point where he is arguing that he wants to eliminate his print edition and go strictly online or cut the print publication to a monthly magazine format and put news emphasis on the online publication. If you listen to his reasons, they make a kind of sense. I think he is wrong in his conclusions, though, and have said so on the listserve.

While out walking this morning I couldn't help but come back to why I think he is wrong. His wrongness can stimulate some good questions for community college journalism instructors to think about in defining their programs, especially if they are undergoing or about to undergo a program review at their colleges.

• What is the purpose of your journalism program?
  Is it to train journalists of tomorrow or serve your campus community?

The answer should be both. (My evolving philosophy/mission statement.)

I personally think there are other purposes just as important, such as developing critical thinking skills, leadership skills and media literacy, for example. But to keep the discussion simple, let's focus on those two questions and how they relate to print vs. online (or, better yet, print and online) publications and skill sets.

The follow-up questions, then, become:

• How best do I train the journalists of tomorrow?
  • Is the journalism student best served with a print publication? or
  • Is the student best served with an online publication?
  Assuming, of course, this is an either/or question.

• How best do I serve my campus community?
  • Is the campus community best served with a print publication?, or
  • is the campus community best served with an online publication?

TRAINING JOURNALISTS OF TOMORROW
If one focuses on the print and online publications aspect of training tomorrow's journalists there is a strong argument that too many of us spend too much time teaching print journalism. We put a lot of resources in teaching students how to write for print and how to design for print. And some days it appears as though that is just what our students want. If you throw magazines into the mix, as some of our JACC schools do, you really see this. Students who sign up for Cerritos College's magazine classes overwhelmingly are more interested in design presentation than learning a magazine writing style.

I've long maintained that the role of a journalist is to gather information from a variety of sources, synthesize or make sense of that information, and then prepare so that it can told to others. The debate we're having --indeed the throes of the industry these days-- is over that last part: in what format will we tell the story or deliver the information?

In our community college programs we continue to overemphasize print over other media because that's the way it has been for so long and that's what we learned in school and know.

Despite overwhelming data that today's younger audiences --our primary reader demographic-- do not read print newspapers very often and are more likely to get news online over print we continue to emphasize the grand old print publications we understand and love. I get a lot of information online today. My computer is a close companion of mind. But I still start each day poring over a couple of newspapers in print format (though I could wean myself from that if the coffee shop I like to have breakfast at offered a wireless connection and an electrical outlet (no iPhone for me yet.)

Given the data about younger readers and all the news about the industry gutting itself of print reporters, Robert is correct in arguing that we are spending too much time training students for an industry that will look drastically different by the time they hit the job market, even if that is next week.

We need to be putting more of our efforts into teaching how to tell stories online. (And there is data to suggest that means storytelling with audio and video as much as or more than with typed words.) That's what Robert wants to do at Cypress. More of us at the community college level are moving that way, but Robert has his machete in hand and is cutting and slashing a trail so far out there ahead of us that we barely can see him in the distance. I'm not completely comfortable with where he's at, but somewhere down the road we're going to look at what he's done and perhaps be a bit jealous. (I've written about the idea of being a pioneer here before.)

SERVING THE CAMPUS
But where Robert is wrong in what he wants to do lies in the second question. Again, for many years I've said that the main reason we have journalism programs at about 70 of the 109 California community colleges is not because our schools are particularly concerns about training journalists of tomorrow. And thank goodness for that, because the constant news of journalist layoffs would cause our schools' administrators to argue that journalism is dying off and we need to stop teaching journalism and redirect resources. No, the main reason journalism exists at our campuses is that school administrators still want a student newspaper (and magazine in some cases).

It may be true that students do not generally read newspapers and that they get their news from online, but site statistics I see about the Cerritos College Talon Marks don't convince me that that many students read the student newspaper online either. Most the hits the Talon Marks get come from search engine searches...and most come from the east coast, not Southern California where we are located. (How many of us check into that on a regular basis; do we know who our readers are?)

Robert, in his listserve posts, reports that fewer and fewer copies of the print version get picked up these days and uses this as a justification for eliminating the print edition and concentrating online, but he offers no evidence that Cypress students get their campus information from CyChron.

Perhaps if any of us are seeing fewer copies of the paper being picked up the problem lies with us not covering news that is relevant to our readers. In such a case, simply doing what we do online will not help. At least with the print edition we have the benefit of the random pickup. I'm reminded of the old saying, "Out of site, out of mind." Without a print edition we are out of site, or rather we're hard to see amidst all the other online options. On our campuses we all still are pretty much the only newspaper laying around.

We still serve our campuses best with a print edition, but I think we can enhance the print edition service with online supplements. And we should. We not only enhance the print edition by doing so, we fulfill the training mission better. For now there is not only room for both, there is need for both.

As for Robert's idea of going to a monthly news magazine, there may be some room for thought. I'm still uncomfortable with being out of site with timely news updates, so I don't fully agree with his plan. Certainly there is precedent for what he suggests. I look first to the industry's leading magazine: Editor and Publisher, which after 100 years of weekly publication went to a mostly online format and a monthly, expanded magazine. There is no doubt that the magazine improved, and so did news coverage of the industry.

When E&P made the switch I religiously checked in daily for new news for months, but after a while I fell into the habit of going to the web site less and less. Today, it is out of site, out of mind until the print edition shows up. E&P offers a ridiculous "Most Read" RSS feed that keeps serving up older stories and does not offer a "Most recent" feed like it should. But even if it did it still begs the question, unless the online publication has a way of reaching me daily --something I have to request as opposed to seeing a copy of a print edition conveniently placed in a newsstand around my campus-- it is out of site, out of mind.

For the Cypress plan to work we have to:

1. Make sure our readers want what we have to offer at least enough to come looking for it,
2. Offer easier ways for them to stumble across it when they forget about us, and
3. Develop our corner of ubiquity in their lives.

Schools could help us do that if they were interested in doing so, but they aren't. One way that schools could do this is agree to set the default home page of every campus lab computer browser to the student publication. Another that Robert even suggested is allowing student web casts to fold into the ever-increasing video displays set up by commercial vendors; schools could negotiate that as a condition for placing plasma screens all over campus. (Imagine that, merging a commercial venture with an educational mission of the college itself!)

In the meantime, the monthly news magazine is an interesting concept, but falls short of serving the campus a timely news source likely to be utilized by students. Still, Robert gives us food for thought. It is good to challenge your way of doing things every now and then. Without those challenges, we get complacent and weak. And we get left behind.

Soundslides under pressure

JACC completed its annual convention this weekend and one of the big changes was the introduction of our first on-the-spot multimedia contest. Student teams (2-3 per team) from 25 colleges set out on LA's colorful cultural icon Olvera Street to find a feature and develop it under deadline pressure using SoundSlidesPlus software. For about half the teams, this was the first exposure they've had to SoundSlides, much less editing audio. But the excitement for a multimedia challenge among our contests was high.

The students had one day to find a story and collect photos and audio, overnight to edit everything and one hour in a contest lab to assemble the final product. Most teams stayed up all night editing and not all completed the task. Unfortunately, four teams who DID complete a project, had their files corrupted in the save process and judges could not open them. (My mistake for not checking them as we collected them so that students could re-export! I learned something new, too, as I've never seen this kind of corruption before.)

Projects were judged on the spot and winning teams honored during the convention.

A lot of tired folks at the end, but they were stoked.

All completed entries, except for the corrupted ones, can be found on the JACC web site at www.jacconline.org. (Or jump directly to the story with links here.)

We called this contest Team Feature 2.0 as it replaced our earlier contest of a writer and photographer working together to develop a written feature plus photo. For the future we hope to introduce Team Feature 3.0 where the final project is video. We need to work out computing issues though and, quite frankly, I'm not sure we have enough time for good editing to take place even if we find a level playing field with computers.

A contest with a purpose

One of the missions of the California Journalism Association of Community Colleges is to provide educational opportunities for journalism students outside of the classroom. That's a fancy way of saying we hold conferences with workshops. But sometimes it means something else.

A big part of many of JACC's conferences are contests that test students' skills. But last weekend the JACC board of directors changed one of its contests in a way designed to encourage programs to start teaching multimedia skills in their classes.

The board made an experimental change in its Team Feature contest. This high-profile contest brings together a reporter and photographer to create a feature package. Too often it has been a feature writing contest that just happens to have a decent photo entered along with it.

Enter Team Feature 2.0, which will be the format for the 2008 convention in Los Angeles next April.

Team Feature 2.0 provides an interesting twist to JACC’s venerable contest. In keeping with industry trends the contest will give the writer and photographer new challenges as they work together to create a multimedia story using SoundSlidesPlus software.

Writers will gather information and craft a story using text and/or audio while photographers put together a series of photos to illustrate the story. More than ever, the writer and photographer will have to work together to construct a compelling story.

In the end, the team will come together in a Macintosh computer lab to put final touches on the story using a simple-to-use SoundSlidesPlus software program that brings together audio and photos, or stories can be told through photos and text captions.

The simplicity of the software tools and the wide availability of digital cameras, from high-end single lens reflex cameras to low-cost-but-high-quality point-and-shoot cameras, will insure that even students from schools without regular multimedia journalism programs will be able to participate.

At next weekend's Northern California regional conference at San Jose State University I'll be introducing and explaining the contest to students and faculty from 20 or so community colleges so that they can spend the school year practicing for the contest and creating slideshows for their online publications. I'm also preparing a second workshop called "Think Online" where I hope to encourage students to change their thinking about their online publication and to encourage instructors to start their own in-classroom "Think Online" campaigns. I repeat the workshops three weeks later at the Southern California regional conference, where another 30-plus schools will probably participate.

We'll also do workshops at the convention on how to use SoundSlides and how to edit audio using Audacity: We're trying to use easy-to-obtain software available for Mac and PC, so even the poorest programs can afford to make this leap.

BTW: I love Ryan Sholin's latest blog entry on "Five Ways to Produce Online News Without Asking the Web Guy for Help." I plan to share it with next week's participants.

Student learning outcomes

Note: The Western Association of Schools and Colleges has changed its accrediting standards to put more focus on student learning outcomes --a shift away from what we teach to what students learn. While we've known for some time this was coming and that our community colleges were going to have to show movement this direction, schools have often waited until their turn in the accrediting cycle came up to push their faculty into actually moving.

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I've had several requests from other advisers in the last few weeks about sharing student learning outcomes. Even though we did a workshop on them at JACC Mid-Winter Faculty Conference in Morro Bay a couple of years ago some advisers are just getting around to them now.

I always am conflicted when people ask. I want to help, but I feel that each of us should develop our own outcomes based on what we actually teach. While we teach the same subjects, how we teach them varies from school to school, teacher to teacher.

As I was working with students in my newswriting class this morning --we're learning AP Style-- it dawned on me that the best time to write Student Learning Outcomes was throughout the semester as the class is being taught. This week I've introduced them to AP Style. What am I expecting them to learn and how will I evaluate that they've learned something? Seems like I should write an outcome expectation right now while I'm teaching it.

In my newspaper class we held our first critique this week. After 31 years it seems like I am always emphasizing the same stuff in the first critique of the semester. Seems like I should write an outcome expectation right now while I'm teaching it.

In my mass comm classes I just lectured on the expectations of the journalism major. Seems like I should write an outcome expectation right now while I'm teaching it.

And a lesson I learned from the Morro Bay workshop that has stuck with me came from Mike Reed, who co-taught the Blue Heron session: Outcomes should be written for more than just the individual classes. The sequence of courses I teach hopefully add up to more than the sum of their parts. There needs to be a set of outcomes for the program: what, additionally, would I expect my students to learn if they take a sequence of courses we call a major?

Just a thought....

P.S. Student learning outcomes are merely make-work if the only reason you do them is to comply with accrediting standards and school mandate. It is only when you truly use them to measure whether students are learning what you say they should be --and altering your methods/goals if students don't-- that they become meaningful.