Managing Your News Website
A news website can offer your students a valuable professional experience and educational opportunity. And, unlike the printed newspaper, it can be done with relatively little out-of-pocket costs.
A few basic understandings:
A news website is not your newspaper on a computer screen.
The web is a different medium from print. To obtain its full potential as a medium, we must think about it and use it differently from print. Of all the points we make in this workshop, this is the most important. Our hope for this workshop is that you will come away with an understanding of this concept.
News websites emphasize and demand the heart of journalism — information.
Journalism uses four tools: text, images, audio and video. Each is a way of getting information to an audience. The technology for distributing the information — the website — is fairly simple. Now we can concentrate on learning how to use these tools.
Speed is one of the great strengths of a website.
Because the web has reduced the time needed for production and distribution, the pace of journalism has been accelerated. And our readers/viewers know this. They demand information now — not when we get ready to give it to them.
Your news website can become an important and vital news source for your school or campus.
What other news organization is paying close attention to your school or campus? What other organization is dedicated to telling the students, faculty and staff of your school what is going on there? Likely, the answer is “None.” If so, your website has a great opportunity and important role to fulfill.
Your site can gather a significant and important audience.
If you fulfill that role by providing original, timely, relevant and interesting information, those interested in your school will come to depend on your site to tell them what is happening.
Schedule
The schedule for this mini-workshop is as follows:
Day 1: News websites: the basics
Day 3: Pictures, audio and video
Where we’re from:
And here’s a Google map of where our workshop participants for the Oct. 20111 workshop are:
View Managing Your News Website workshop participants in a larger map
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