Soon, it will be January 2005. It will mark the beginning of a new semester. More importantly, Rick and Staci will be celebrating ehub's 6-month birthday.
Instead of rejoicing with cake and ice cream, they'll be passing out syllabi to the new team of online editors.
Throughout that semester the team will attempt to refine the relationship between the Kansan and the Multi-media newsroom. They will also try to recruit what Rick calls "tweeners" (Strategic Communication majors interested in News) and work to accomplish other convergence goals.
But next semester will be different than this semester because we will have built a foundation for them to work from.
In a dream world, Everyone will get their online news from the ehub Web site. The University Daily Kansan, KJHK and KUJH-TV News would all contribute their information to this site and it would serve as an example of the school's ability produce award-winning online news.
Unfortunately, this scenario won't happen in the near future. Revenue and marketing boundaries have constrained this idea of online convergence at the University of Kansas.
The ehub site should be managed through a formula driven by education, not revenues and profits. The site should offer an educational experience to all the students involved in the operation, including the Kansan and KUJH-TV staffs.
Converging campus media into one Web site requires a group effort. And the biggest contributors must be the students. Students within the individual media need to become more familiar with other campus media. A solution to the current situation would be a news meeting where the Web team, the Kansan and KUJH-TV hold morning budget meetings together. This effort would unify the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
In addition to student efforts, the faculty must also help a school that promotes convergence actually converge. Now, it looks like individual campus media will be competeing online.
Our class is in the midst of redesigning KUJH-TV's Web site. We need to showcase our ability to create a successful Web site that is more than just shovelware and place for reader comments. The success of this project might be the best way to converge the Kansan and the other campus media.
Convergence can't happen overnight. Our class will have created a comprehensive plan for managing and maintaining the ehub Web site through our redesign project, so next semester's class has a better chance of converging this school that is supposedly the front runner in convergence.
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