Cardinal Courier site barraged by Paul supporters

Want to get people to read your online newspaper? Want to be flooded with comments? Write about presidential candidate Ron Paul.

Just look at what happened to the Cardinal Courier, the student newspaper at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y.

On Wednesday, the newspaper wrote an editorial criticizing the presidential candidate's performance in the Nov. 28 CNN/YouTube debate.

"I saw the debate," Editor-in-Chief Bill Kuchman wrote in the signed editorial. "I watched every minute of it. I heard every answer. While the results were a mixed bag, I know one thing for certain: Ron Paul is a waste of my time and trivializes the entire debate process."

The response was almost immediate.

"Within the first two hours of the article being available online, it had over 2,000 views," Kuchman wrote in a letter to The Student Newspaper Survival Blog Wednesday evening. "This was a lot for us considering our previous high for a day was just under 2,000. As of now, the article has close to 6,000 views and over 220 comments." (By Thursday evening there were 287 comments on the editorial.)

The Cardinal Courier staff did some research and found that DailyPaul.com, a site created by Paul booster Mike Nystrom, had picked up the article and was urging readers to comment against it.

"The comments not only defend Paul, but attack the character of our paper and of myself," Kuchman wrote in his letter to us. "The funny thing is that in the editorial, I talked about Paul supporters hijacking political discussion on sites like CNN and in response, that's exactly what they did to Cardinal Courier Online."

Kuchman asks: "Have any other newspapers run into this kind of thing? I'm sure the Cardinal Courier isn't the only one to wade into political arena now that we're less than a year away from the presidential election."

If you've had a similar experience with presidential politics or with a blog launching a campaign against your site, post a comment.

Student editor responds to The Loop

Bill Kuchman, editor in chief of The Cardinal Courier at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, writes in response to our post about The Loop, a new Web site for college students in the Rochester, New York area launched by the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Kuchman has been one of the students working on The Loop since the project began in May.

I'd like to address some of the concerns that you brought up on the Student Newspaper Survival Blog, as I feel that I'm in a unique position being the only staffer on The Loop who currently serves as a college newspaper editor in chief.

I was hired to be a part of the initial group of students to work on The Loop. From my over three months working there, I can assure other college newspapers that the content on the site (for the most part) won't infringe on the territory of college newspapers. Believe me, as an editor in chief myself, there was no way that I would let The Loop move in on what college newspapers cover.

When you look at the stories on The Loop, you'll see that they bring in a wider audience and write about issues from a Rochester standpoint, instead of just a singular campus standpoint. For example, if St. John Fisher College's president were to resign, the Courier would cover it as just a news event from Fisher's campus. The Loop would bring in issues involving other campus presidents and recent changes in administrations. This is something that as a college newspaper, we don't have the resources to do, and frankly, isn't what our readership is interested in.

When it comes to staff, I am confident that this issue will resolve itself over time. Fisher's student on The Loop for the fall isn't even a member of the Courier. We at the Courier also have rules and guidelines built into our staff requirements and ethics policy regarding conflict of interest. If the issue of a member of our senior staff taking a job at The Loop were to arise, this is something that we'd address based on these policies. I cannot speak for other papers, but I am highly confident that the Courier has the experience and the understanding of proper journalistic boundaries that will be sufficient to guide us when working with The Loop.

In terms of advertising, we haven't suffered any loss of sponsors - we actually continue to add new accounts. Many of our advertisers have been with us for several years and understand the effectiveness of advertising in a college newspaper, especially a proven product like the Cardinal Courier.

I hope that this will resolve some of the concerns in regards to The Loop. If anyone would like to further discuss this issue with me, I'd be more than happy to talk to them.

--Bill

William R Kuchman
Cardinal Courier Media Executive Editor
Cardinal Courier Editor in Chief
Class of 2008
St. John Fisher College

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Another invasion on college media turf

Watch out, student newspapers. Here's another effort by a professional news organization to reach out to college students--and steal your readers. This one is called The Loop and it's aimed at college students in the Rochester, New York area.

The Loop is a partnership of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and seven area colleges: the State University of New York schools at Brockport and Geneseo, St. John Fisher College, Nazareth College, Roberts Wesleyan College, Rochester Institute of Technology and Monroe Community College. There are plans to expand to others.

The Rochester area has 80,000 college students attending 19 schools, according to The Loop.

The site, which formally debuts today on the Web, is largely staffed by students at those colleges. It will include blogs, news articles, galleries, a calendar, online forums and other features.

It's similar to BigLickU in the Roanoke, Virginia area and Swocol in Ohio.

We'd love to hear from The Lamron at SUNY Geneseo, The Stylus at SUNY Brockport, The Cardinal Courier at St. John Fisher College, The Monroe Doctrine (great name!) at Monroe Community College, The Gleaner at Nazareth College, The Beacon at Roberts Wesleyan College, The Campus Times at the University of Rochester and other college newspapers in the area.

How do you feel about this new site? Are you collaborating with it? Are you worried about losing readers to The Loop? What are you doing to compete? Post a comment here or send an e-mail message to collegenewspaper@gmail.com.

You can read more about The Democrat and Chronicle's plans for The Loop here.

My previous post about Swocol.com is here.