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.
- Are we practicing media convergence?
- Are we cross linking with sites that are involved in our stories?
- Are we taking advantage of other campus media for cross promotion?
- Is our website easy to find, use and navigate?
- 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.
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