Words from Experience
CMN Editors Emeritus and some of our pluckier advisors share some advice and philosophies on publishing in college media.
34 postings
1,911 page views
Making it “sticky” – Simple tips for getting first-time readers to spend more time on your site
7/9/10 3:23 PM
By Casey Smith Advertising and Marketing Director The Daily at the University of Washington csmith06@uw.edu If you were a first-time visitor to your paper’s website, would you want to explore it beyond the articles on the front page? Is there even anything to explore on your site beyond the front page besides an archived list of articles? For most news sites out there, the answer is no, and this is a problem. This means that your site is not “sticky.” What is a “sticky” site and why would you ever want one? A sticky website is one in which a reader lands on it for the first time and finds it difficult to leave – not because of pop-ups or a series of prompts asking them if they’re sure they want to leave...Crowdsourcing and user comments
7/7/10 2:55 PM
Lynn Rickert Editor in Chief, The Pace Press Pace University editor@pacepress.org How often do you get story ideas through crowdsourcing? Do you ask your readers for their opinions on your content? Recently Fark.com's Drew Curtis voiced his opinion on this saying he believed only one percent of web comments are constructive. What he seemed to want was for the journalism world to go back to pre-Internet days when the only way to really give feedback to a newspaper was to write a letter to the editor, which might or might not be made public by getting published. Do you agree? Or do you think the Internet changed journalism for the better? I think since everyone has the right to free speech, they should be able to use this right by posting their thoughts and opinions on the Internet. I...Upholding high standards on a low budget
7/6/10 1:53 PM
Colin Darland Editor in Chief, Arizona Daily Wildcat University of Arizona cdarland@email.arizona.edu editor@wildcat.arizona.edu For college newspapers, one of the few things harder than making deadline is convincing people that you are a real newspaper. In my experience, a skeptical student body or a few tactless moves by newspaper leadership can really kill a publication’s reputation. Maybe I am just whining, but it seems like college newspapers are held up to an even higher level of scrutiny than larger metropolitan papers. Thanks to their sheer size, people just assume city papers are vetted, trustworthy news outlets. Student papers, on the other hand, are given the fun task of having to earn this qualification each and every semester. If your paper suffers from this...Three easy tips for presenting multimedia online
7/2/10 12:26 PM
By Casey Smith Advertising and Marketing Director The Daily at the University of Washington csmith06@uw.edu There’s unlimited space online. In print, we have to work around the news-hole, and that hole is getting smaller and smaller as the industry shifts. Just because we have more space online, though, doesn’t mean we should just throw up more content for the sake of having more content. So here are a few tips on how to really make that space count, because at the end of the day, the job for any editor is making information as accessible to the reader as it can be. A good story with poor presentation is always less likely to be noticed or read. Tip 1: Use at least three forms of...Daily layout ideas on Front Pages blog
6/30/10 3:24 PM
Lynn Rickert Editor in Chief, The Pace Press Pace University editor@pacepress.org Need ideas for your layout, but can't afford subscriptions to all the major newspapers? Look no further than Frontpages.Tumblr.com, a blog that posts screenshots of all the nation's major newspapers. Washington, DC's The Newseum, a museum all about news media, posts more than 800 front page layouts on their website, Newseum.org, but the Front Pages blog only pulls a select few, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and even the UK's Guardian. The blog also posts links to each paper's top stories of the day under each front page layout. It's a great tool to check out the day's news and see how major newspapers lay out their papers — without paying subscription...