You know, I had a lot of fun putting together multimedia web packages this summer. What we've done with the advanced TV students isn't very different, except that it wasn't fun this time. It was frustrating, disorganized, and unimpressive.
Don't get me wrong — I think the stories the TV students put together were great. But over-compressed QuickTime files, hastily print-ified scripts, and a few links just don't seem remarkable to me after working with them for a semester. A lot of this, I think, is because we're still using Blogger — and we all know how I feel about that. Blogger is cool the way 8-tracks are cool: both are obsolete but worthy of nostalgic fondness.
What would do these stories justice?
First, I'd like to see the reporters think a little harder about gathering extra information before they start the reporting process. I'm not sure how everyone else did their projects, but by the time I met with my TV partner, she was nearly finished and so our approach to getting "web exclusive" material was just to salvage interesting quotes from her interviews. If we were paired up before the TV students even picked their topics and were part of that creative process, I think we'd end up with better material for the web.
Second, Blogger's got to go. Next semester, we'll hopefully have the new KUJH-TV website to play with. But I'm a hardcore handcoder, and with a templated site like we're using, I think we could have saved a lot of time if everyone was given a generic html file and inserted their story into it. The only tags we weren't coding ourselves were the paragraph tags, and those are the most painless of all. No waiting for Blogger to rebuild, no waiting for Blogger's server to come back to life, no adding people to the blog's "team," just getting. it. done. Not every project needs a CMS, and with a small project like this, handcoding ain't that bad.
Third, it would have been really great to have a better idea of what exactly the TV and web students were each responsible for contributing to the story. We figured this out eventually, but confusion caused some delays.
I'm not sure if/how these projects have been done before, but this round didn't particularly impress me. That said, I'd bet next semester's will be vastly improved since The Powers That Be have been listening to our feedback.
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