A match made in Heaven

Convergence, convergence, convergence. This concept has been drilled into my head throughout my entire J-school experience. Consequently, I see converging the University's news sources as the best way to improve tv.ku.edu.

I've briefly mentioned incorporating Kansan.com with tv.ku.edu in a past post, but it's important enough to deserve its own post. Having two news-oriented Web sites in one journalism school seems silly. Merging the two into one site would be the best use of the school's resources.

Kansan.com and tv.ku.edu are a match made in Heaven.
Illustration: Jyl Unruh

The gross repetition of work between the two media outlets became apparent to me a month ago during my web producer shift. A 415er was discussing story ideas and most, if not all, of them came from The University Daily Kansan. This got me wondering: Why not have Kansan and KUJH reporters work together? As Sam noted on his blog, finding a story idea is the hardest part of the story-writing process. TV and newspaper reporters working together would allow reporters to brainstorm on story ideas, making the process easier. Also, fewer ideas would need to be formulated because we'd only need enough content for one Web site.

Converging won't only be easier for reporters, but also better for readers. All stories would have video written elements, similar to what tv.ku.edu is doing now. The big difference would be the reporter who gathered the facts and talked to sources would be responsible for the written story. Often when repurposing scripts, I resort to the Internet to fill in a lot of holes in the story. Posting Kansan style stories will prevent this and ensure primary sources.

With two reporters working on every story, the video and written elements could focus on the same topic but have slightly different angles. Having the exact same information in both elements, as we currently do, discourages readers from looking at both stories.

We could also get The Kansan photographers involved. While the video would be the dominant visual at the top of the story, numerous photos could be dispersed throughout the package. Web producers could get involved through creating web extras such as infographics, graphs or slideshows.

Through converging with The Kansan, we'll optimize journalism students' educations and making them more marketable. At the same time, we'll provide KU students, Douglas county citizens and virtually the entire world via the Internet with better news content.