New Media Old Media

I'm not at all surprised by the number of story ideas from our planning session today that focus on using multimedia platforms to publish (the new media) rather than the traditional interview, write, print format (old media). This is one of the biggest questions I'm facing in my journalism classroom. We have a very successful print newspaper (touted by everyone, but confirmed by no one, as the oldest continuously printed student newspaper in the state), and we've been trying to find ways to go online in addition to the printed paper. There is no way the print paper will die for my school--I know, that is a statement not many can make. The newspaper is a community institution and it would take a severe financial catastrophe to see cuts in the journalism program. We piloted an online paper last year and I feel like we did a fairly good job of promoting it (pegs in the print edition, announcements, links on the school's website) and absolutely no one read it. We tried short, eye-catching pieces, lots of photo galleries, quizzes and other entertainment, and we even went so far as to put up fun polls where students could vote on things like faculty members' most awkward school photos...and we were the only ones who voted! At the end of the year, we decided to take down the online edition because (we could hardly believe it, either) the print paper was so much more popular.

This past school year we took another tack. We started a Twitter feed and live tweeted from school events and gave shout outs to students who won awards, showed kindness, etc. We tried very hard to have a news peg to some of the tweets so that our print content matched up with our social media platform. In addition to Twitter, we started an Instagram account and ran contests where students could submit photos based on a theme. The editorial staff would choose the best ones and print the winners in the regular newspaper. The winners got a small prize, which also motivated people to participate. We plan to continue the Twitter feed and the Instagram contests this coming year; the passwords were handed on with great ceremony to next year's editors. Yet, I still really want my students putting news and features and video online. I'm still not entirely sure what went wrong with our first try online. Honestly, it really can't be true that our students prefer to handle a giant, inky mess rather than to scroll on their ipads. I hope to learn enough here that I can help my students finally put together a successful online paper without sacrificing the quality of our print paper.

Shannon Kuehmichel
Berlin High School
Wisconsin