After a week of revisions, here it is the second draft of our KUJH-TV Sports Proposal. One major difference is the change in structure of J-231 which would hopefully be in place for the fall of 2006. Take a look.
April 2005 Archives
Our first proposal was a learning experience. We realized that, even though we thought we had it all figured out, there was much, much more to be discovered. When producing a Web site, content drives everything. After this realization, we worked hard to lay out the specific details of what each person will be required to do to make this sports Web site and this entire sports reporting department work. We hope that with this new, more detailed proposal, the process will begin to move forward. Check out our proposal and see what you think.
My cross country coach in high school was Coach Scarborough (we called him Coach Scar). He told us that when we run down hills we should let our bodies loosen up and run with "reckless abandon." I couldn't imagine a better way to describe this stage of creating a sports site. We have all finally hit our stride and as the ideas and papers and files pile up around us, I see us all running down this hill as fast as we can. We are gaining momentum and we are coming up with concepts and possibilities so fast that we don't know what to do with them. Soon enough we will reach the end of the hill, and straighten out and all this confusion and stress won't be as hard anymore because we are almost done with the race, and we can see the finish line ahead of us. Aww, wasn't that sweet? Here's the draft.
I heard a rumor today. Granted, it was a rumor started by a slightly over zealous Adobe fan, but that aside, it did give me pause. My source claimed that Adobe was planning to do away with Flash. Eeek! Before you throw yourself into a screaming rage and cuss out Flash, read page 6 of the merger FAQ. The official FAQ (in pdf format, of course). I can't copy it for you here because the pdf is password protected. I googled around and didn't find too much in the way of "answers." But, I did find this statement, on a Macromedia product manager's blog, to be reassuring, if not vague.
We are still committed to Flash as a development platform (probably more than ever now).
Merger of the century? Perhaps. Downfall of Flash? I think not. How crazy would these people have to be to kill Flash? Certainly not after all the blood, sweat and tears that developers have spent learning the how to animate a spinning tire (those of you have gone through the tire tutorial know what I mean). These two companies are smart enough to see the big picture. We must give credit, where credit is due. Both companies have been innovative and successful, and I look forward to the things that will come. With the merger, I have no doubt they will do great things for the web, and develop great tools for online journalists.
Don't be afraid of change (but then, that's another post altogether).
If you're still having trouble stomaching the news, try reading this.
Right now, sports reporting and production for KUJH-TV and tv.ku.edu is essentially a free-for-all. This proposal outlines our ideas for structuring classes in the coming semesters to provide a definitive direction for educating journalism students about sports coverage on TV and the web. The purpose for structuring sports classes is to help students and instructors achieve the mission we set out for tv.ku.edu, as well as improve the content and production for KUJH-TV and Sports Talk. Structure will make each student responsible for producing quality content by assigning them specific tasks and giving them a grade for it. Students genuinely interested in sports reporting, whether online or broadcast, will thrive in an environment where expectations and rewards are clearly outlined. For a look at how sports classes may be structured in future semesters, see our proposal for the structure of sports journalism classes at KU.
We realized early on that "thinking big" was not the way to plan a project of this magnitude. Because of this, we made our initial plan simple and to the point. We want to cover all KU sports, with an emphasis on the non-revenue sports. KUJH Sports TV should have its own Web page separate from tv.ku.edu and each sport should have its own separate page within the Sports Web site. We also think it is important to include multimedia elements unique to our site as well as elements similar to other sports Web sites.Read our complete proposal.
It has been difficult for our design team to create a final design of what we want for the sports web site without knowing exactly what the content of the site will be, but we have a start. Let's take a look into the layout of what will be sports.tv.ku.edu, or Sports TV.Read more.
I am so proud of what our KUJH-TV students did Thursday night. As of 7:12 p.m. the results from the Student Senate elections aired on KUJH-TV. The results and clips from the TV reports were also posted to tv.ku.edu thanks to 694 students, Meagan Kelleher and Louis Mora. These two went above and beyond the call of duty. Louis and Meagan were both in the newsroom for more than eight hours today. And a special nod to J288 student Alex Wiebel, who hand carried eight pages of final results up the hill to the Kansan before the evening was done. Truly a case of cross-platform cooperation in action.
Way to go team! This, this is what it is all about. Team work, dedication and just a hint of HTML. You have learned much my grasshoppers, perhaps more than you even realize. You should feel good about the work that you've done, and proud of what you've accomplished in this class. I know I am. In fact, as I sit here typing this post, I am grinning from ear to ear.
Who is responsible for posting and editing content on tv.ku.edu? Who qualifies as an online producer or online editor? Do we have online editors for our web site? If we don't have online editors then should we have them?
"I don't think we know," answers the first two questions and "not really" and "yes" answer the other two. I think in order to avoid the legal ramifications of posting something on our web site that is libelous, defamatory or just plain embarrassing we need to answer those questions better.
It's not as though the tv.ku.edu staff has never asked those questions. Recently, to the humiliation of a fellow student, all of the above questions were brought to our attention. We discussed what had happened and Uncle Rick told us that it's a big no-no to joke around on a live system. What we didn't discuss, a least not to my recollection, was who's really in charge of tv.ku.edu and how to deal with editorial issue, seemed seemed to me to be at the heart of the matter.
I believe that if somebody, although I'm not sure who, doesn't clarify who can create posts, what content they could post and who would edit posts, then, the next time something slips past us, we could really be in trouble and be left pointing a lot of fingers.
For example, today during my MMN shift I copy edited teases on the Flash page and stories that the online producer had posted the night before. As I looked through the copy and made corrections, it was obvious that I was the only editor who, besides Staci who had originally noticed the mistakes and the person who made the errors, had looked the story over. It occurred to me then how much we post that dosen't get at least glanced at by a second set of eyes. It also occurred to me that from now on maybe I should consider myself an online editor as well. Would that be accurate, if I'm really only editing my own work and occasionally someone else's?
To be fair, just about all of the content that is currently posted on our web site comes from KUJH scripts, which for the most part have been edited; so, it's not as though there should be any egregious errors. And because our web site has been in operation for only several months and there aren't a lot of pages or places to post something that would go unnoticed, this isn't a crisis issue; but, it is something we should think about.
The quick and easy solution to avoiding editorial problems is to create online editor positions. The hard part is figuring out who would be willing to do and capable of doing this -- just what every student wants: More work to do and more responsibilities. But I think the need for online editors will start to become even greater as online producers begin to create more content that is original.
And, if we do decide to put someone in charge of editing content before it appears on the web site, then Joe Marren's article, The Craft of Online Editing, would be a must read.
We live in a world where people like to interact with other people through the Internet. We have instant messenger, text messaging and now the interactive portion on a number of web sites, message boards.
Every fan wants to share their opinion after the teams' big victory or be the first to call for the coach's head when they lose. Believe me, I had some furious postings after the Bucknell loss. People don't care what they say, but those who sponsor the message board do care. This can land a web site in hot water. While we would like to include a message board to attract our audience, we need to be aware of stepping into a problem that we could have avoided from the beginning.
After talking to several online production people at the Lawrence Journal-World, the one thing they repeatedly emphasized was developing a policy that would illustrate to readers what exactly the rules are for the message board and the consequences for breaking those rules. Some examples include the one used for the message board on kusports.com or the policies on lawrence.com . The kusports.com policy includes, "Any submissions you make may be edited, removed, modified, published or displayed by The World Company without prior notice at its sole discretion." This keeps them out of hot water and illustrates their point to what a member of the message board can expect when they post a questionable statement.
There is no doubt, if we want to add a message board to the sports section we need to sit down as a group along with Ted Fred or some legal expert, and see what we need to include in this policy and what things we can and cannot include.
Wilson Miner, online production manager for the Journal-World, said it is key to establishing a policy so that you don't arbitrarily make up the policy as you go along. Our visitors need to understand immediately the stance of the web site and what the consequences may include by posting such a message. The Journal-World has the policy of simply removing any message that the policy deems inappropriate. I think this is a policy we should adapt if we want to add a message board. We should reserve the right to remove any message that may be vulgar or derogative, instead of editing the post. Editing can put us in hot water because if we were to edit, then we would be held responsible for the rude comments that cause harm.
We don't want to be put in a situation where we can be held liable. Therefore, a policy that outlines these rules is a must so we cover our asses. We need to look at the policies of other web sites and discuss what we need to include. This needs serious consideration and as a group we must come together to establish the policy of the sports news web site.
Maybe I should start this blog with a disclaimer: This material is the result of both thought and speculation. It should not be taken too seriously nor re-presesented without the author's permission.
When I started thinking about legal issues the sports staff could face, my mind went back to a discussion at the beginning of the semester about the validity of showing various photos of a mother breast feeding in public to poll the audience about what they think is appropriate. Though this isn't a sports issue, it strikes me that what we discussed as an ethical problem could possibly be a legal problem. What if we had shown the mother in a state of -€˜exposure' without her permission? That would be an obvious legal problem. Does the picture violate standards of indecency for a news organization? I don't know.
KUJH-TV sports, because it is a unique combination of both print and broadcast, will face the same legal issues that KUJH-TV news and the Kansan could face. We already saw one example this year of something that could be considered dicey with the headline one student accidentally wrote about Roy Williams. Crediting photos and video correctly is a must to avoid legal hassles, and we successfully navigated that earlier this semester in news by calling to get permission from the city to use their map. Clearly, we can't use what isn't ours without permission. What about something like cursing or vulgarity in fans' signs or in a quote from a sports fan? How do we handle that, and is it considered indecent to show in a video clip? What about shooting and posting video of sports? We probably need press passes and permission for athlete interviews for each sport we cover.
We may not have the immediate answer to all these questions, but the solution is fairly obvious. We need an editor, someone in the "€˜middle management" position, as Professor Musser says, to make some important decisions about what should and shouldn't be posted to the web. I know I've already stressed the importance of a second set of eyes in my rants about the need for copy editing on my personal blog, but we could find ourselves in legal hot water without finding someone to take on this role soon. In the long run, maybe we should consider an attorney to provide legal advice for KUJH-TV when necessary, similar to the Kansan.
The largest legal concerns for tv.ku.edu are showing footage and interviews. As far as interviews are concerned, the athletic department has requested that we obtain permission from the SID of whatever sport we want to cover be it revenue or non-revenue.
As for game footage, the athletic department will not allow us to record any major event that with be broadcasted in its entirety. We may however take clips from such footage to use for our sports programming, as long as the length of the footage does not exceed three minutes for basketball games. As far as football and other minor sports are concerned, we should be able to use an unlimited amount of footage.
Collecting footage for local high school sports will be surprisingly easy if we want to send somebody to the games to collect the footage. The athletic director of each school has the power to give us permission to cover any high school sporting event. The high schools have the capabilities to record and produce content, but they will only do so if it has been requested. High school athletes, who are usually minors, can legally consent to being interviewed.
In my opinion, having a message board as a part of our sports site is mandatory. In addition to being highly addictive, message boards are a great way to increase the number of visitors to our website. With the message board comes the obvious question of editing and censorship.
The message board should work a little something like the word on the street message board at the LJW. We could choose a question of the day or just let the people decide what issues they will butt heads about. We could choose a few comments from the lot of them to get people all hot and bothered and then give them the link to put in their two cents.
Upon choosing to enter the page with the rest of the comments, we should direct them to a page with the requisite, these views do not reflect the views of KUJH TV statement and give them a list of rules about posting before they can continue with a little agree button. We could let them look at the conversation, but they would have to sign up and give us an e-mail address (which we can legally use later for surveys and research) before they can post.
We cannot simply allow the users to post whatever comments they want. The page must be censored in some way. If any profane or obscene comments are posted to the site we should simply take them down and issue a warning to the user via the e-mail address they used to get a handle. We should not change the comments that the users post in any way.
The text briefly reviews some of the dangers of inserting deep links, or meaningful links, as we like to call them. I don't really see any problem with using deep links with the Kansan, KU sports sites or even the LJW for that matter, as long as it is extremely clear what site we are sending them to and that they are no longer on our site.
While we want to serve a wider audience through our Web presence, our priority is to provide a beneficial educational experience for journalism students at KU. The possibilities for audiences for the sports Web site at tv.ku.edu are wide-ranging. We believe that the audiences that would benefit most from a sports presence at our Web site are KU students and alumni, student athletes, their families and the Lawrence/Douglas County community. These audiences are the basis for our mission statement.
The mission of KUJH sports
With our primary focus on education we serve students who are in journalism intereasted in sports reporting by providing them with the opportunity to learn how to balance between reporting and commentary while gaining real world experience working alongside professional media at athletic events. Education is not the only thing we serve, but we need to not lose sight of that focus. The sports journalism students will serve a psychographical audience consisting of the international KU sports family.
One of the best things about the net is that EVERYTHING is there. You name it, you can find it. So when it comes to sports coverage, people expect that we cover everything. And in order for the KUJH-TV web site to become a legitimate news source, we ultimately should cover both revenue and non-revenue sports.
Coverage means stats, schedules, game previews, athlete profiles and rivalries. Sports online gives anyone, especially fans, a way to get all the information about their favorite team.
We could write pages upon pages about everything that is possible with sports online. We could format the schedule to bring up pictures of the stadium where the game is happening, what time it airs on what channel; we could have a clickable schedule to see archived video of each game. But then we need to be realistic about what we can do with sports online.
We don't have a full-time staff of paid reporters covering sports like Kusports.com, but we do have students eager to get experience. Based on time and the number of people we have available, sticking with on-campus sports is realistic for the next several semesters. Even covering all the KU athletics will be a challenge at the beginning, so we'd be wise to use interaction by getting submissions from parents, coaches and athletes to supplement our news stories.
Having Rylan Howe as our photographer, dedicated specifically to the web site, we will have high-quality images on a consistent basis to post online. This will eliminate the hassle of finding someone from the Kansan to take photos or convincing KUJH-TV reporters to get still shots.
Realistically, nothing is going to change much next year, but with everyone officially enrolled in a class, we can have more control over what students are covering. Sports reporting will be more organized and we'll have more people available to cover more sports.
Is it really necessary to blog about sports events every day? We know Staci really likes the idea. At the risk of being hated by future sports students, blogging could attract a lot of eyes as part of an online sports presence at KUJH-TV. Sports columns in the Kansan and other newspapers are well-read, so a web version of SportsTalk via blogging would probably be a big hit. We'd just have to single out a sports nerd to make the time.
Our mission statement as a sports presence is to entertain and educate. Read our mission statement
Brainstorming session
Team AM here (that's Ashley, Amanda, Amber and Meagan). How do we do something different as a sports presence? That has been one of our concerns as the team in charge of functionatlity and details of the website. There are already so many different sports pages out there, how can we make ours different? Our first brainstorming session brought together a lot of ideas that we can develop in the next few weeks. First off, we decided that the page should be a separate entity from tv.ku.edu. Something along the lines of sports.tv.ku.edu, called SportsTV. Here are the results of our brainstorming session:
Looking at what already exists
Kuathletics.com: What we liked about this page was the color scheme, the "logo", the mini-flash piece and the schedules that are easy to find. We decided that by next semester we might not have enough content to carry a flash piece on our separate page, so we dropped that idea. The schedules are a common element we found on almost all the pages. We liked the use of KU colors, but if we are going to be an all Lawrence sports program, than should we still use red and blue? What colors say Lawrence, KS?
Kusports.com: Our favorite part of this site is the big picture to indicate the feature story. This is one aspect we want to carry over to our page. The categories for each sport are easy to find, and for our page we will probably pare down on the amount of categories since we won't have as much content. Sticking with categories like high school, intramural, club, Haskell and KU might be a starting point. But we need to discuss this with the content team.
Other random thoughts we had was the importance of keeping past stories easily accessible, so that when someone chooses Haskell sports they see all the stories we have reported on Haskell. Another thought we had was creating a Local Sports Blog. This blog would include a couple paragraphs from a local athlete or coach at the beginning of the season or before a big game. We would just have to call the person, have them email us a blurb and then post it for them. This way we get the locals involved and drive traffic to the site.
These are just some initial thoughts we had on how to approach the functionality issue of sports online at tv.ku.edu, and we are excited about how we can bring something different to sports coverage in Lawrence.
