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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Integrated college media sites

There’s been a lot of discussion at college media conventions and on the College Media Advisers listserv about what we should do to compete with sites like BigLickU, SwoCol.com and The Loop that target our readers and advertisers.

Before we start trying to reinvent the wheel, let’s look at some college media sites that already take an integrated approach.

One of the oldest and yet still among the best is bruinwalk, a campus portal for UCLA. In addition to providing links to The Daily Bruin, UCLA TV, UCLA radio and several campus magazines, it offers social and academic networking, a campus calendar, professor reviews, student-to-student book trading, online file storage, and a marketplace of goods and services.

The site is run by Student Media UCLA and governed by a communications board representing a broad cross-section of the campus community, including undergraduate and graduate students, the administration, faculty, alumni and the media professions. According to the bruinwalk About page, the board “is entirely self-supporting. It receives no registration fees or other forms of public support. All of its revenues come from advertising sales in the media.”

Amazingly, it’s been around since 1998, long before Facebook and MySpace!

Another one to look at is InsideVandy at Vanderbilt University. In addition to offering news, features, commentary, photos, videos and other content produced by Vanderbilt student media, it allows members of the Vanderbilt community to create content and interact with one another.

"InsideVandy is built for community participation," the site explains on its About page. "Use it to debate, discuss and connect. Start a blog, post your photos, submit items to the community calendar. Comment on other people's content and create some of your own."

Though not as extensive, the Northern Star has long gone beyond the typical student newspaper Web site with a dining guide, a housing guide and free online marketplace. The Northern Star is also doing some neat stuff with video.

Is your college media organization doing something innovative? What other sites do you look to as models? Tell us about them by posting a comment.

College OTR enters college media fray

Here's another alternative to traditional college media: College OTR (On the Record).

OTR describes itself as "a new network of campus-specific blogs, written by students, for students, making sure that whatever happens on campus goes 'On The Record.' Think of us as your campus paper on crack -- quicker, funnier, and better-looking (even though we may be missing a few teeth)."

To date OTR includes bloggers from Boston U., Claremont, Cornell, GWU, Harvard, James Madison U, Northwestern, NYU, Penn State, Purdue, Stanford, Syracuse, Tufts, Vanderbilt, Vassar, Wesleyan, Yale and the universities of California (Berkeley and San Diego) Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri (Columbia), North Carolina (Chapel Hill), Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (Madison). The site, which is still in Beta mode, is planning to officially launch this fall.

Each school has its own home page like this:



The site is actively recruiting (according to CollegeWebEditor.com, student bloggers are paid $500 per semester).

Because it's not regional, I don't see this as a threat to college newspapers in the way BigLickU, SwoCol.com and The Loop are. It's hard to imagine these folks stealing our advertisers or even our readers in any serious way.

And from what I've seen of the content so far, I don't think we have to worry about our best and brightest staffers fleeing our newspapers to go work for College OTR. This site seems to specialize in unsubstantiated rumor, writing without reporting, goofy photo illustrations and not only anonymous sources but anonymous reporters.

Some examples:
* GWU: More Good Places for Hooking Up, Now with a Sexy Risk of Getting Caught

* University of Florida: Your boyfriend sucks... And apparently your best friend does too

Still, College OTR could beat campus newspapers to the punch on stories.

It's something for college media folks to keep our eye on--if only for lessons in what not to do.

What do YOU think of College OTR? Post a comment!