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Earlier this year, I judged a prestigious national contest that chose the best college newspaper website in the country. It was a tough decision.
Usually, when a judge says he had trouble selecting a winner, all the entries were so damn good it was hard to tell the difference.
But in this case, nearly all the entries were so damn boring it was hard to tell the difference.
The contest I judged is SPJ's Mark of Excellence. It receives more than 3,600 entries in nearly 80 categories -- everything from editorial cartooning to radio news reporting to TV sports photography. A more recent addition has been "Best Affiliated Website," and I was asked to pick a first, second, and third place from 2009.
The winner was Ball Bearings from Ball State University, followed by The Short Horn from University of Texas-Arlington and the State Press from Arizona State University.
Besides the winner -- which is truly inspired, you really gotta see it -- the runners-up and the nine other finalists featured very similar designs and nearly identical content. (Check out The Miscellany News and the Daily Tar Heel and the Central Florida Future, just to name a few.)
Most of the stories on these sites are mere "shovelware," meaning print articles are tossed online without much thought. Or pictures, graphics, or video.
What's so weirdly depressing is that I've seen many of these newspapers in print -- and they kick ass. From the design to the writing to the photography, you can tell talented students sweat and bled for their paper dreams.
Their print editions have verve. Their online editions have templates.
Smarter people than me have noticed this. Ask most college newspaper advisers, and they'll grumble, "I'm old and telling them to work harder online. They're young and telling me print is their priority."
Educated explanations for this irony focus on the technical: Students don't have the desire or the time to learn the complicated programs to create truly edgy websites. But I believe the real reasons can be best explained by psychology, not technology.
Here's what I've seen at the South Florida college newspaper I advise...
Dead Trees Make Me Feel Alive
Today's college freshmen created their MySpace pages in middle school and their Facebook pages in high school. They've been posting prose and pictures since puberty. So writing and shooting for their college newspaper websites doesn't impress them. Or their friends and family.
Everyone has a Facebook page. But not everyone has a newspaper page.
College students don't seek status the way adults do. Adults compare cars and careers and their kids' schools -- it's all about raw purchasing power. But college students are too cool to be capitalistic. Scarcity is their currency.
Over the years, I've seen them brag about acquiring the latest iPhone -- not because it was expensive, but because they got it first. Once everyone owns one (especially their parents) the boasting is over.
Print is special to college journalists precisely because it's old tech: Hey, I must be important because they killed trees to publish my words. A living thing died for my genius -- and not yours.
If Facebook was available only in print, college journalists would flock to the web.
The Velvet Page
The easiest way to insult a college journalist? Tell him his story will run as an "online exclusive."
Since websites have an infinite amount of space that costs nothing, and since newsprint has a limited amount of space that costs a lot, and since all print stories run online anyway, college journalists interpret "online exclusive" as "you think I suck."
As print editions shrink with the recession, that real estate only becomes more valuable. It reminds me of the way college students decide which nightclubs to go to.
What's the most popular nightclub in a college town? The one you can't get into because there's a velvet rope and a line out the door.
If you want to force a reporter to quit your staff, run his stories only online while running everyone else's in print.
The In-Your-Face Factor
On our campus, newsprint is still the most mobile and immediate form of media.
Nowhere else in South Florida are newspaper racks so closely bunched. Even if our students don't read the school paper -- and most never do -- they'll probably walk by at least two of our bright-red bins on their way to class.
Nothing motivates a student journalist like seeing his front-page story splashed all over campus. And he can easily impress his friends by tossing them a copy and nonchalantly saying, "Here, look at this."
But if that same journalist is assigned a dreaded "online exclusive," his hard work is interred on the Internet. To resurrect it, he has to whip out his iPhone or Droid, wait for the page to load on a very small screen, then pinch and landscape. That's way too much effort to show off.
Ugly Ain't Easy
College students are all about appearances, but they'll never admit it. What other demographic spends as much time on their clothes so it looks like they spent no time on their clothes?
Many college newspaper websites look like ours -- not as clean as Facebook and only a tad less cluttered than MySpace. Alas, it takes a lot of time to maintain even a homely newspaper website. It requires a lot less time to design a fetching print edition.
(For tech-heads who will argue this point, try simultaneously teaching a student Drupal and InDesign. Which will he master first?)
Contrast our website with our print edition. The latter looks better. We've won several national design awards, but only for print. That creates its own momentum, so each new art director is lured by the hours-to-awards ratio their predecessor enjoyed.
Printing Money
The web is the future. Print is the past.
The web is the combustion engine. Print is a buggy whip.
Web, renewable energy. Print, fossil fuel.
Journalism advisers use these analogies to convince students to spurn print and embrace the Internet. Doesn't work.
Why? Because the most intriguing jobs are still in print. There aren't a lot of them, and they're dwindling every day. But college students rarely contemplate the odds when considering their careers. It's the same reason college rock bands and rap groups think they'll hit it big: Those other musical acts suck, but we're going to make it.
Whenever I meet new recruits at our student newspaper, I ask them, "What do you wanna be when you grow up?" The answers almost always involve traditional print or broadcast: editor of Elle, music reviewer for Rolling Stone, investigative reporter for The New York Times, anchor for CNN, foreign correspondent for NPR.
I never hear, "Content producer for a cutting-edge multimedia website."
Then again, I also never hear, "I wanna be a college newspaper adviser."
Follow Michael Koretzky on Twitter: www.twitter.com/koretzky
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I think part of the problem is that there's not just an embracing of the idea of content as content versus online and print. And part of the problem is that the advisers say to go online, but that's it with not enough direction.
But I also think of one of my professor friend's in PR at Auburn - not only do the kids do design work, they also have to blog (on a Ning network), design a Website as their portfolio, use Twitter. They are more enmeshed in the full digital experience (some kicking and screaming) but realize what they have after they leave the University.
But it's been years since I've been gone from college, so it might be different.
J school professors, with an entrenched background in the print media, in other words, are to blame for most of the difficulties encountered in trying to move to a more modern platform. They simply think the old paradigm still functions in the environment of the web, and turn away from socially engaging audiences, or teaching broadcast-style storytelling techniques to their students.
And the author, bemoaning the fact that a student has to "wait" in order for a web page to load on a droid or iPhone in order to show off content is simply evidence of not being able to realize opportunities in a new-media platform universe. Just load a PDF file of the story on the phone and be able to instantly reference the piece.
Every minute you fail to grok these kinds of new media opportunities is another minute you're cheating your students of a first-class education in the field.
Get with the program.
Imagine taking an 8.5x11" sheet of paper and setting the side margins to 2" each, so that you only have 4.5" of usable space. Now within those 4.5 inches, make four columns of text, each barely an inch wide.
This is what your winner, and all five of the finalists did. They left half of the paper blank.
Good luck with a writing career when you can't even fill a single page.
Most stories were either/or - either text or video. Where were the packages that combined text, video, images, slideshows, podcasts to tell aspects of the story?
With imagination and effort, the online environment can provide entirely new ways to inform, educate and entertain diverse audiences, from the verbal learners to the visual learners and those in between.
Doing an article on yoga? Why not some animations showing people how to do the poses, so that they can practice at home. The latest on the Arab-Israeli conflict? Give me links to the past history so that I can gain context and provide me a place to post questions for other visitors to comment.
ims ip multimedia
Ever notice that what you're saying is also true about professional journalism? How many great looking newspapers have terrible websites and multimedia content? Most of them.
Your comparison of Drupal to InDesign shows a complete lack of understanding of web publishing (and that's ignoring that using Drupal for a college site is a bad idea in the first place). Posting content isn't what makes the site look good. What college papers often lack is a fully-functioning site with a nice-looking stylesheet. That means code. Do you teach your j-students CSS, HTML and PHP, among other languages? My "digital" j-prof taught us how to make "websites" with iWeb and how to blog on Blogger (but couldn't do it himself). The root lies in that journalism educators and programs may claim to be digital but alas are not.
Hopefully you do teach your j-students to avoid unsubstantiated claims and broad generalizations. Because I tried learning InDesign and didn't, but I did teach myself CSS, HTML and some PHP, not to mention how to post in a variety of CMSs. And my dream job would be as a producer for a great multimedia site.
The fact that you made this argument at one of the ugliest news websites is so ironic. It's also ironic that your own web presence looks like this: http://www.koretzky.com/michael/
Now that's embarrassing.
But I agree with you about HuffPo. Websites should be designed to mimic their owners. So my site looks pretty damn good compared to its fleshy founder, while this site isn't nearly as attractive as Arianna Huffington.
-- Koretzky
Granted, the NewsHouse is also aligned with actual classes, so that makes a difference.
Moreover, most college papers are bankrupt or subsist on a mixture of school funding and ad revenue, relying entirely on free, volunteer labor -- so hiring a web team is not an option. (And while volunteer writers get to see their names in print, at least, back-end technical people get no recognition for their volunteer work, so it's hard to recruit them.) Upperclassmen run most college papers, too, so the leadership turnover is constant -- which makes it hard for papers that either want to leave CollegePublisher or start a long-term site redesign projects to do so.
Finally, because most college papers are free and available across campus -- and most valuable as a distraction tool during class -- the majority of students still read them in print, not online. (At least that was my experience.) So when it comes time to prioritize time and resources, student editors still usually choose print.
That's a pretty apples to oranges comparison. You don't have to know Drupal's guts to use it, just like you don't have to know the guts of ID to use it. I can teach a student to post something in Drupal (or WordPress or Blogger) in 10 minutes. I can't do the same with InDesign.
"Alas, it takes a lot of time to maintain even a homely newspaper website. It requires a lot less time to design a fetching print edition."
No, it doesn't take a lot of time to maintain a web site, since it's all about the *content,* and much of the presentation is automated. Also, with RSS feeds pumping out content to social media and feed readers, many people won't even see the design of the site in question. And then there's teh Google, which enables people to discover your content via serendipity.
Once a print edition is superseded by the next issue, the same is not likely to happen.
/devil's tech advocate
From a quick look at that "inspiring" Ball Bearings site, I find it buggy, distracting and not as user friendly as it could be. Three quick examples: visitors can't embed videos on other sites; articles don't have a most read or related stories list, which makes it hard to navigate; some stories don't have a comment box. And don't get me started on the black background.
Journalists need to stop trying to create all these flashy designs and concentrate on what they do best, which is reporting and story telling. Then they can get together with designers and try to figure out the best way to present their stories on the web - with an emphasis on story delivery and site functionality.
Our stories have hardly any text so not having a white background is actually a good thing. When there is text, it is placed on a white background allowing it to be easily read by the user. The black helps you concentrate more on the story. If you need an example, check out Mediastorm, our inspiration. Embedding video, that is something that will come, but content comes first (http://ballbearingsonline.com/Gearbox/?p=41), as you said.
One thing to think about is that we are not a spot news organisation. We do feature stories, so that allows us to deliver content in a way that student newspapers can't. So in that sense, student newspapers should not try to look the way our site does.