A grow­ing num­ber of col­lege news­pa­per are mov­ing to Word­Press as a Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem. For a time, Col­lege Pub­lisher seemed to be the only way a col­lege news­pa­per could be pre­sented on the web.

Has your paper made a switch in Con­tent Man­age­ment Systems?

How did it go?

What do you wish you knew before you started?

Show us your site. (Please)

As I update our web pol­icy, I am reminded of a prob­lem that I’ve run into almost con­stantly as edi­tor of my cam­pus news­pa­per: Face­book as a dis­trac­tion from work.

I’ve con­sid­ered block­ing the site on each news­room com­puter except one, where reporters/editors could log on to use the site legit­i­mately. I really don’t want to have to do that though. I’d like to instead enforce a rule that would help curb erro­neous or aim­less use of the site, espe­cially when other work could be done. There are always press releases to be rewrit­ten and story idea sheets to be writ­ten up, etc.

Any sug­ges­tions? I’d like to encour­age respon­si­ble use of the com­put­ers rather than act­ing like a mean babysit­ter. Just for ref­er­ence, its the copyeditors/designers and edi­tors them­selves who are the biggest offenders.

For col­lege news­pa­pers across the coun­try, the aca­d­e­mic year is wrap­ping up and in the words of the great Bob Dylan, “…the times, they are a changing.”

As edi­tors and staff move on to what­ever is next and lead­er­ship roles are filled by new peo­ple there is a pass­ing of information.

A lot of what you’ll be doing will stay the same. A lot of what you do will get bet­ter. A lot of what you do won’t be fully appre­ci­ated by your read­ers, but we the inky-fingered mem­bers of col­le­giate news­pa­pers are a unique mili­tia of infor­ma­tion. (more…)

From the days of brows­ing a bare-bones World Wide Web, where an occa­sional graphic was a treat, to our mod­ern fully-interactive, Flash and JavaScript media dri­ven web sites of today, a lot has changed.

To say the least, brows­ing the web has become quite a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. We’ve reached a day where we don’t think twice to pull out our cell­phones to look up a quick piece of infor­ma­tion. “Oh, I’ll just Google that,” or “let me check Wikipedia.” We can do this in the blink of an eye and a fin­ger tap of a screen.

But where does that put us, the col­lege news­pa­pers of today. Many of our papers are just now get­ting online. Oth­ers are just now join­ing the social media craze. But how many of us have mobile ver­sions of our web site? (more…)

All week, while edit­ing at The Daily Ever­green, I see things that grind my gears.

I write these things down. (more…)

Let’s just say that last week was unprece­dented for us here in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. (more…)

Col­lege news­pa­pers uti­liz­ing social media like Face­book and Twit­ter, or even on the newspaper’s Web site can ben­e­fit from inter­ac­tion between and with their read­ers. How­ever, as com­ment­ing, shar­ing, links and all other becomes an active part of your news orga­ni­za­tion, a pol­icy may be nec­es­sary to main­tain the integrity of the social media.

We’ve had a few inquiries about this. If your paper has a Social Media pol­icy, a resource for one or some­thing else ben­e­fi­cial, please paste it as a com­ment below, or share a link to it.

My staff writer and I are cur­rently work­ing on a full-page Oscar spread for the upcom­ing awards. Unfor­tu­nately, we can’t seem to find a qual­ity site that has up-to-date images of the actors and/or screen shots of the movies. Does any­one know of a site where we can find the images nec­es­sary to make this page happen?

We also run into this prob­lem when writ­ing album/movie reviews. It seems like all of the sites that have images of the album artwork/movie posters are heav­ily copyrighted.

Any insight?

Rachel Harper
Edi­tor in Chief
The Lookout

Odds are, if an orga­ni­za­tion has a Web site, they prob­a­bly also have a Face­book Fan page. Even Col­lege News­room has one.

But for col­lege news­pa­pers, a face­book fan page can cre­ate a forum where com­ments may be less about sto­ries and more about attack­ing writ­ers, staff mem­bers or spread­ing rumors. (more…)

When the Dal­las Cow­boys released Ter­rell Owens in early March 2009, Face­book and Twit­ter updates were abuzz with indig­na­tion, cel­e­bra­tion, and indif­fer­ence. Despite the dif­fer­ences among those reac­tions, one thing could be agreed on: by the time the news­pa­per printed a story the next morn­ing, T.O.’s release was no longer break­ing news.

To com­pound mat­ters, his release was a devel­op­ing story full of off-the-record sources reveal­ing infor­ma­tion well before the release was made pub­lic and offi­cial the next day. Web sites were updated with sup­ple­men­tal news as quickly as it came in, mean­ing the local news­pa­per wasn’t only scooped by ESPN.com, a national news outlet—it was print­ing day-old infor­ma­tion. (more…)