This post is part of the Carnival of Journalism which, this month, is hosted by Adrian Monck. You can read all the other offerings from the day’s blogging over on his post.
I have to apologise for being a bit late posting today. I’ve been in Dublin since Friday having what can only be described as an utterly fantastic weekend.
I’d actually written a post for this day a few days back, but ended up selling it to Press Gazette, where I’ll be starting a student journalism blog this week. My first regular paid gig, so I’m very excited.
Anyway, today I thought I’d write about how student journalism is adapting to new technologies. If the generation gap with technology applies to journalism, then in theory students should be showing everyone how it’s done.
But how do students cope with teeny-weeny budgets, limited man-power and minimal expertise?
Gair Rhydd, Cardiff’s wonderful student rag, has a thriving web presence. It has triumphed in producing student debate — one recent column has attracted 62 comments. Where Gair Rhydd falls short, however, is in the multimedia. There is none. But it’s a very professional package that really impresses.
York’s Nouse has always been a favourite of mine, but suffers from the same lack of multimedia as Gair Rhydd does. The site is built on Wordpress — and looks to be a very solid platform which looks great. I especially like the quote in the top right corner. Nice touch.
Over to Cambridge, and we see one of their papers, Varsity, has entered into the multimedia world with their podcast offering. Which, they boldly state, the first ever by a student newspaper. Not sure how they came to that statistic, but if it’s true, it’s great to see innovation in the works at Cambridge.
Unfortunately, the website resembles something between a shopping site and a lifestyle magazine, which, I’d argue, devalues their lead stories somewhat.
At Lincoln we tried a little experiment. To cover the SU by-elections, we created a little mini-site, and blogged the night. We included audio clips as well, and, I think, produced some entertaining coverage. Problem is, nobody read it — such is the dire state of politics at our University.
We will shortly be formally launching LincTV, which is being produced by the television journalism students at Lincoln. I’d like our paper to become the leading multimedia student paper.
Which will no doubt be a huge challenge. After all, we quite often find ourselves in the position of knowing more about online journalism than our lecturers do. And there lies the problem: Online journalism is almost unteachable. Sure, you can learn skills on software, but at the end of your degree, it will all have changed, leaving you as a tradesman adept only in pre-historic tools. Useless.













Really like TheLinc Live, good idea. Might have to steal that one for our site. We do a little bit of video stuff on our site http://www.pluto-online.com but as you said, with tiny budgets and few resources it’s difficult.