March 2005 Archives

Sports news coverage has grown beyond the boundaries of the old-fashioned box score. There are endless numbers of sports shows, publications and web pages. While we venture into the growing world of sports journalism, there is a way that this small fish can survive in the big ocean. We have strengths that we must utilize with eager students, an existing site and a great SID for the non revenue sports. Now, these strengths must come together with the opportunities to help form this web site. While it may seem that the important, money generating college sports are covered, there are other sports that exist besides football, baseball and basketball. We must do something different, and that is to cover those sports that don't get the intense cover to generate an audience. Check out my game plan for the structure for the sports coverage of the web site.

We need structure in our sports department at KUJH-TV. Oh wait we don't really have any type of sports department besides me and Natalie Flanzer then some anchors who show up and be talking heads. Well, here is my sports structure proposal.

Before we start creating a sports presence for tv.ku.edu, we need to take a step back and look at what we can do and how we plan on doing this. By looking at what we can do in the short-term, we will be on a much better road to creating a stable sports presence. Here is my proposal for a sports presence for tv.ku.edu.

Tuesday evening I was sitting in the newsroom at the G5 working on posting the newscast to the web. I was typing away when I heard the dispatcher over the scanner say fire alarms were going off at Bailey hall. I looked around the newsroom and started begging people to go up the hill and get some video and sound of this Bailey fire. Chris Kauffman voluntered to run up the hill. Not more than two minutes after Chris left, Staci Wolfe called down from Stauffer-Flint saying she saw Chris outside of Bailey Hall and that Peggy Kuhr was on the phone with the Kansan wondering why someone from KUJH was there before a Kansan reporter. The fire was a false alarm but nothing at tv.ku.edu is a waste of time. Hey, now we have some archive video of firetrucks!

Firetruck outside of Bailey Hall

Firemen outside of Bailey Hall

Emergency vehicles outside of Bailey Hall

When I was 22 and a reporter for the South Bend Tribune, all the reporters in the newsroom took obituaries before deadline. We slugged them "obit" or, for a second-day obit, the slug was "funeral notes." The assistant city editor, Mac, would stub out another cigarette and shout, "Musser! Obit on line three!"

At some point, one busy morning in 1970, I cranked another piece of copy paper into my manual typewriter, lit another cigarette, took another obit call and pounded out another slug. Only this time I shortened the slug for a funeral note to "fun note."

Now we all know that slugs only identify stories and never get into print, right? Wrong.On that day I learned one of the oldest lessons in journalism: Don't jack around with copy in a building that turns the words you write into tons of newsprint with barrels of ink. Of course, some printer neglected to take the slug off the story and some bereaved family member opened the paper that evening to see "fun note" at the top of an obit I wrote.

It happens. And it happened again in a new medium Wednesday. A web producer was training an anchor/reporter to use the KUJH web site so the reporter could cover the NCAA basketball tourney over spring break. In the training process they made up a practice headline: "Roy Williams Commits Sucide after loss to Kansas" (yes, a bad joke) and, being very careful not to hit the publish command, marked the story in the "top news" category and then (they thought) buried it deep in the web site system.

You can guess what happened next.

The story didn't actually appear on our web site -€”- where we would have noticed it immediately. Worse. Somehow (and we are still trying to figure out exactly how) the site's coding picked up the headline and automatically published it as a KUJH-TV top story on the Journalism School's web site. That's where a sharp-eyed alum noticed it and called the Dean's office to let us know that "suicide" was misspelled. (The pregnant sarcasm of that message leads me to believe the caller had been trained by John Bremner, but I don't know that for sure.)

We took the headline down so fast that we erased the electronic tracks that would have helped us understand why our backend system did what it did. But the lesson is not in better source code. It is a lesson that never changes: Don't jack around in a newsroom with fake stories. Years ago, KJHK somehow read a story on the air in which a town in Iowa disappeared in a nuclear attack. Even The Great Communicator, President Ronald Reagan, once declared he was going to bomb Russia when he thought the mics were off and the cameras weren't rolling. "Dutch," an old sportscaster himself, should have known better.

And so should we.

Still, I'd like to think Roy Williams, whose own career rides on the successes and failures of 20somethings under his training, would sort of understand. The coach lives. And he knows that those of us who work with college students, students whose performance is out there for all to see, coach not only their performance but real life lessons. The kid who made the mistake feels awful. He has learned a basic newsroom lesson. And we'll continue to coach lives as well as the basics.

So our assignment this week was to create a slideshow. So, here it is folks, the Rock Chalk Jayhawk Journalist Slideshow!Click the image to watch the QuickTime video slideshow!

A closer look inside the Multimedia Newsroom. (Quicktime required)

The new newsroom has allowed University of Kansas journalism students endless possibilities in the world of media. Whether students are calling sources on the phone for interviews, putting vo/sots on the computer for the nights newscast, editing videos on imovie, writing script for KJHK police brief, preparing equipment for reporters or making remarkable slide shows for J694, everyone has something to do.

All of the photos present in this slideshow are from the morning of Tuesday, March 8, 2005. As staff deliberately works on their stories I invade their space with the new digital camera. It is their turn to be featured. The journalism staff is the top story today. They have earned the recognition.

As the band Counting Crows said, "all of this shit, just sticks in my head." These words could not be more appropriate for the newsroom. The constructive criticism that we receive from Uncle Rick, the skills we learn from Staci and the interaction we are allowed with technology and our fellow students will remain in our minds and hearts forever.

The audience of KUJH TV is the University of Kansas, meaning that our audience includes students, faculty, employees, and alumni. The audience for our website is, at present, an extension of the KUJH TV's viewers. To become a viable addition to the campus media, this has to change.

The first step in increasing the audience of our website is to admit to ourselves that a great number of people on campus are not even aware of our existence. To fix this problem, we need to ask ourselves the following questions.

1. Are we practicing media convergence?
2. Are we cross linking with sites that are involved in our stories?
3. Are we taking advantage of other campus media for cross promotion?
4. Is our website easy to find, use and navigate?
5. How can we advertise and promote ourselves on a limited or budget?

The answer to questions one, two and three are not enough. The answer to four is no, and the answer to five is fairly easily.

The biggest problem with our website is that when anyone tries to find it, they have to try to find it. Go ahead and google KUJH TV. The first link will take you to the KUJH TV official site, from which you can find out tons of information that no one ever wanted to know about us, and probably never find our pretty little page with the flash show and online stories. The second choice is a great map of our signal strength, and the third is a Kansan story about us. Companies pay people to make sure that when a customer googles the company's name that the best link pops up. I'm surprised that people can even find our page when they try.

The goal of a multi-media news room should be the seamless convergence of all media with in an organization. Whenever our news stories overlap Kansan news stories, there should be a link between the two pages. If the Kansan prints an article similar to a story that will be on the nightly newscast, then why not have the web site at the bottom of the page. Are we at war with the Kansan for its audience? Is this a contest or an attempt for the J-School to succeed in all levels of Journalism?

Why not contact KJHK and give them a listing of our stories so that they can throw out a plug? It seems like we could do all of this for free without too much effort. If the story is online before the nightly newscast then we should always tell the viewer to go online, and when they do, they should have access to more information than was in the newscast.

So now that we have all our cohorts on board, let's look abroad for a little help. When we do a story on an organization, club or department, we should cross link the websites so that our readers can check them out and vice versa. An organization that we put online would probably love to have its members check out the story on our page, and after they have gone there they might check us out on a regular basis.

All in all, we have a lot of work to do to increase our audience and none of it should be very hard. I'm not really sure how much our friends at the Kansan and KJHK will be willing to help us, but hopefully they will realize that what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

When buying a computer, I chose a laptop over a desktop and paid an extra 50 bucks to install wireless internet in my house. All I wanted was to be able to sit on my couch with the tv on and spend at least an hour a day on the internet. I don't think I'm alone.

Students today love to be engaged with the internet. Take the amazing popularity of facebook. Is the site in any way spectacular? It's just a photo with listed interests, but people love having an excuse to be on the web every day.

This is where tv.ku.edu comes in. Today, when the editor of the Red Eye spoke to our class, she took an impromptu survey. More students admitted to reading their news off the internet than picking up a daily paper. A lot of people think we need the Kansan to become popular, but I think we can offer our audience things that the hard copy of the Kansan can't.

tv.ku.edu is off to a good start. We have a hard-working staff that supplies users with the news in a visual and print way. This is a solid foundation. I think for the site to take off, however, we need more than that. Posting stories to the web is a full time job in itself. I think if tv.ku.edu wants to really expand, it has to have a staff of people whose only job is to dream up and impliment web extras for the site. Although our class occasionally has the chance to do these things, we're generally too concerned with learning the basics and getting the bare minimum up.

Possbily, the next step would be to create a class after 694. These students would already know the basics of web journalism and would be able to focus on expanding stories. They could look over the budget at the beginning of each day and then spend their shift creating graphics, maps, shooting extra footage or creating extra links. They wouldn't be distracted and consumed with getting the stories up. That would be taken care of. These students would be able to focus on giving our audience something different.

If our website has so much more to offer, then all that's left is a little advertising, chalk on the sidewalks or purchasing ads. Then our website can speak for itself, which I think is the most important aspect of attracting a larger audience.

Just last week I experienced an interesting contrast in audiences between the Kansan and tv.ku.edu. Matt Rodriguez was expressing concern over how the Kansan staff did not want to cover the Murray trial because they only cover campus issues. Matt said he felt that since there is murder trial in his town, media outlets should be covering it, because it does indirectly affect KU students. This makes me think about what tv.ku.edu's audience is. The Kansan's audience is clear-cut: KU campus. KUJH-TV goes broader with KU, Lawrence and Douglas county. So where does that leave tv.ku.edu?

At this point we are aiming for the same audience as KUJH-TV. The main difference between us and the TV station is that we can reach so many more people than the station can. Originally, I thought since we have the power of the Internet, we can make our audience bigger and bigger. However, the tune of my song changed after hearing Lara Weber from Chicago's Red Eye speak to our and Peggy Kuhr's class on Wednesday. Lara spoke about reaching that 18-34 demographic. Their coverage is specifically targeted towards that group of people who live in the city. And they are good at it. That is what got me the most. Lara could easily rattle off what matters the most to readers of Red Eye. Can we do that for the audience of tv.ku.edu? Can we pinpoint a list of 10-14 things of what ALL KU students and Douglas county residents are interested in?

I don't think we know who we are yet as a web presence. Do we simply rehash what was on the Kansan and KUJH-TV? I am not sure how we can find our identity. There are so many people in the newsroom wanting to push this website in so many different directions and our purpose, at least to me is unknown. A key element of figuring out who our audience is, is first figuring out who we are. And then being good at it.

When I asked a few friends today if they ever visit the KUJH-TV web site, their response was, "They have a web site?" Based on my limited survey, I think the first problem in creating an audience for the KUJH-TV web site is letting people know about it.

Because both KUJH and its site are student-run and on campus, the target audience for the site should be primarily the student population. I think the most effective way to let students know about a new way to get their news is to go through an established medium such as the Kansan. Ads in the paper and maybe even on Kansan.com would let students know KUJH is out there with a web site. Airing an ad on KJHK, posting flyers and telling students about the site are other ways to get the word out.

Once people know the site exists, the challenge will be to give students the content they're looking for, and to make sure it's not a mere duplication of something they're already getting from the Kansan or the TV broadcast. Unlimited space, lack of time constraints and the opportunity for participation are features unique to the web that the site needs to capitalize on.

You can't update sports scores by the minute on a newspaper or TV broadcast. You can't have in-depth interviews where you can see and hear the key person in a story explain it in their own words. Newspapers and TV broadcasts have very little audience feedback. They can't provide immediate resources to a reader wanting more information through a hyperlink. All these can be used on the KUJH-TV site to give readers more than they can find in the newspaper or on TV.

A weekly calendar for entertainment would go over well if it were available online. Most students also are interested in sports at KU, and I think expanding KUJH sports coverage and using it for the web site would draw a lot of people, particularly for things such as athlete interviews or continuing stories about less mainstream sports. Regarding participation, adding a comment option to stories would be a basic way of incorporating that into the site. If this is a success, it might be possible to let readers pose a question to the site's audience and let other readers respond, posting both questions and answers on something like a high-tech opinion page.

All these ideas would probably get students to look at the site, but they aren't possible without adjusting the amount of work and the number of students available to accomplish it. The web site will need to have two classes of 694 students maintaining it to really excel, and additional reporters would also help if sports reporting becomes a priority.

If readers know about the site and we continue to improve it, stories like the fried squirrel will help us show readers the value of the web as a medium and the -€˜extras' it provides. Only on the web could you provide layers of information to ethically show a picture of a mutilated squirrel.

The audience of the tv.ku.edu site grows every time we mention the site to a friend or student. I showed my friend the fried squirrel and he loved the picture and now he checks the site on a regular basis. A majority of the audience consist of friends who have heard about the site. So our first step is getting visitors, the second step is to keep them coming back.

The days with the most hits for last month contained some kind of unusualness, blood or crime. The start of the Murray trial, the fried squirrel and the Glee Club on the Price is Right appealed to our audience. These stories have different aspects that make them appealing to the target demographic.

The squirrel is a funny story that provided a great but gross vid along with great graphics. It treaded near that line of too much blood and guts and brought that idea of if it bleeds it leads mentality in a different light. Our audience wants to be able to chose their news and we gave them that option by letting them decide if they wanted to see the picture or not.

The Glee Club story contained the idea of unusual news. It's not every day that we see a KU student called to contestant's row, much less singing I'm a Jayhawk on national television.

The Murray has trial affected the community and has grabbed national headlines. Our viewers want to know what both sides are saying and the latest evidence. With a Web site, that information can be presented in a different context that will appeal to readers of our demographic who would rather look at brief chuncks of information than read a two-page article on the topic.

While we can never predict the news, we can enhance it to make it more appealing without throwing too much info at them. For instance, lets look at the interest in the Murray trial. Just looking at the numbers during the start of the trial we had 55,000 hits and one of the top searches on the site was Carmin Murray.

Our audience wants to hear what happened in the courtroom but if we present them with the same tired text of the prosecution said this and the defense said this style the will find their news some where else. Our audience hates to read and likes the pictures and visual elements. With the amount of information that is out there on this trial there are different ways to present the information that will appeal to our audience who want their information short and sweet and to the point.

It's just like the recent news with the BTK killer. There are so many stories out there about this crazy killer. When I visited a news site yesterday I didn't head directly to the news story. Instead, I checked out the extras that provided valuable information in a different way like the timeline on CNN.com that they have under related links. One final idea that I seem to continue to throw into every essay is the idea of interaction. Our audience has grown up with text messaging, email and cell phones. Just look at the craze of Instant Messenger or Facebook. Our audience wants to be heard and a way to do that is letting them have a voice. They can at least provide some ideas for a story. I know I have witnessed days in the newsroom when people go blank when it comes to story ideas, so getting some fresh ideas would help. We need to add an area where they can express opinion whether it be through a message board or by sending story ideas.

We can learn from the stories that have produced an audience and come up with new ways to appeal to our audience. Before long will no longer have to tell our friends about the tv.ku.edu Web site because it will become their stop for news.

Last week after the fried squirrel incident, I went home to my apartment and told my roommates all about my exciting day investigating the campus power outage. One of my roommates said to me, "Oh yeah, I read about that on the KUJH web site." That was pretty exciting for me to hear because I had barely even ever talked to my roommates and friends about the website, and here she was checking it all on her own! I think it's a pretty cool site, I just think that most people don't know about it.

Right now I would say the audience for tv.ku.edu consists of those who work for the web site, like myself; some of the reporters for KUJH-TV news; some employees of the Lawrence Journal-World and Channel 6 News (who are only checking to make sure they have everything we do); and then those few KU students who are actually aware of the web site's existence.

So I think the first step in building an audience for tv.ku.edu would be to just get the word out about the web site. When I see the large amount of students that at least look at the Kansan each day, and that nearly every student gets on the internet every day, it seems like a website about campus news would easily attract an audience. We can start by telling our friends, and then maybe even look into advertising the web site in the Kansan or with signs around campus. What would be even better is to have a direct link from the main page of the KU web site. Whether that's actually a possibility, I don't know. But it would definitely be good for "business."

Something I keep hearing news people, like Lara Weber from Chicago's Red Eye newspaper, talk about in terms of reaching a younger audience is that you've got to have some "edge." This is kind-of difficult for a University news web site, but I think there's a little edge that could be added. Young people love the internet, and they love to interact on the internet. I know I've mentioned an idea like this before, but we could start by having some sort of discussion board or a place where viewers could leave comments about news. Or, to combine this with the advertising idea, we could add in our advertisements that "we want to hear your news" or something like that. Then there would be an email address listed or a place on the web site where people could leave ideas for stories.

But still, I think there is a lot to be said about word of mouth. I mean, I'm trying to do my part by having a link to tv.ku.edu on my Facebook profile. Well, I suppose I could make a little more effort than that. But anyway, in order to start building our audience, we just need to tell people about the web site and then get their feedback. And the next step depends on whatever they say. Afterall, this web site is not for me, it's for the general public to be informed and entertained.