Lessons learned in a college newsroom #2

Spend the extra time, learn HTML.

The growth of online media has been covered from every possible angle. We know that the newspaper industry is hurting, but what business isn't. Even with that said, I feel it is important to be well versed in other types of media. 

When I sat down in the newsroom on campus everyday during Spring Break with our graphics editor, Marshall Moore, we took the time to learn the basics of HTML and used that knowledge to rebuild our paper's website from ground zero.

The sad part is that not enough college editors are taking the time to do this too. The college news website market is dominated by College Media Network or Wordpress templates. Rarely will I stumble across a college site that was built by the students, and in my opinion, a bad site that is hand-built is more impressive than a Pacemaker winning CMN site.

So, that week of hard work, where two people sat in a hallway (you should see our newsroom, it's that bad) and took the time to learn and apply something that all journalists will have to know in a few years, produced a very good website, a Pacemaker Finalist site.

I know for daily or even weekly newspapers, keeping up with HTML can be "time consuming" but there is something special about seeing two great sites lined up next to each other, and only one of them built by hand.

First Podcast launched

My first Podcast is finally up on both my newspaper's website and available on iTunes. The piece, "Campus in brief" which I produced, wrote and edited (No talking involved, I don't have the most glorious radio voice) is a weekly podcast that breaks the top stories surrounding our school (Spokane Falls Community College) into quick bite-size pieces.

To listen to the piece online:

http://faculty.spokanefalls.edu/Communicator/sections/multimedia/multimedia.html

Or to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes (Even better):

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=315263081

Lessons learned in a college newsroom #1

Is it co-workers who are friends, or Friends who are co-workers? I know that I am not alone in saying that some of my best friends are the people I work with in the newsroom everyday, some of them. But the line between keeping a close friendship and having those same people be part of the collaborative effort that is the production of a newspaper/website is quickly becoming blurred. The solution varies from person to person, friend to friend and editor to editor, but the one thing to remember is that a good friend will be there forever, compared to the four years we have to deal with a co-worker.