One of the major recommendations of the Convergence Task Force was to establish a quality collaborative Web site, one that eventually would become the focal point of a converged newsroom. And, indeed, the students over the past three semesters have created a very professional site with limited resources and a none-too-flexible College Publisher host and content management system.
However, this is also where the lack of time, bodies and significant understanding of, and commitment to, convergence is most evident. The Web site has not become the focal point of the newsroom. It remains pretty much a shovelware version of the newspaper. Indeed, most students view it as such, not as an independent information source.
There is multimedia, some of it very good (see sidebar). The radio station produces short daily news podcasts. Photographers produce creative and professional-looking slideshows. There's access to the two evening television news shows that we now stream live on the site. The sports staff is probably the most converged department in the room with staffers working as a unit to cover major sporting events on a multi-platform basis, including video, podcasts and live blogging.
VIDEO: The first Web editor, Kristen Russo, experienced considerable stress because she had no real job description during the first year.
On the news side, a couple of real-life breaking stories last year – a dormitory fire and a major snowstorm -- demonstrated both the potential and problems of independent student media organizations wanting and trying to cooperate, but not quite knowing how.
This year, however, the presidential election provided a real opportunity for collaboration. With better planning, election day coverage was creative, professional and exhaustive. Three-person cross-platform teams filed reports from Phoenix and Chicago for print, broadcast and the Web. And, they filed updates using Twitter. Photographers created professional slideshows. It was an impressive performance done in cooperation with students from two sections of our Reporting Public Affairs course. It's that kind of hard work and cooperation that is needed on a consistent basis.
A major hindrance to the move to convergence is that the core position envisioned by the Task Force, the Assignment Manager, was never created. No student thus far has had the necessary mindset and skill sets. Task Force leader and KentNewsNet adviser, Susan Kirkman Zake, isn’t sure that configuration will even work. “I think it’s going to be a little bit of a different model that we end up using,” she says.
In many respects, all this is not surprising. Students are trying to produce their traditional products – newspaper, TV news show – and develop a fresh, multimedia-driven Web site. The site just doesn't have a large enough staff, let alone a staff trained in multimedia, multi-platform journalism.
We're probably asking too much of students carrying full loads and maybe even working part time jobs. Indeed, the first Web Editor burned out. Far too much effort going into production issues, and not enough time for creative thought and planning. This year, we added more tech help and more assistant Web editors.
The Process
The task force was a solid move. It got the students invested in the process and the planning, especially once we shifted the focus of the meetings to practical issues and small, cross-platform groups. That was a critical move.
VIDEO: Jeff Fruit says students must be part of the planning process.
JMC director, Jeff Fruit, still strongly believes that you can’t take a “top down approach” with students, where faculty say "here’s the way it’s going to work." For all the students' efforts, after three semesters in the newsroom, they're really just in a Beginning Collaboration mode. A converged newsroom is quite a way off.
Other Issues
Other issues also have slowed down the development of a converged newsroom. Each student medium still wants to operate unto itself; there is residual competition, resentment and stereotyping. Silos aren't found just in the barnyard. The power structure in the newsroom needs to change. The two main players are the daily newspaper and the television station (and their editor and news director). The Web site, which was to be at the core of the convergence effort, remains second or third on the priority list. Not surprisingly, the Web editor does not share the status or power of the heads of other student media.
The traditional student media advising structure -- one faculty member for each medium -- may need reconsideration in a collaborative or converged newsroom.
And, the JMC curriculum -- as hard as we work to keep it current and cutting edge -- sometimes struggles to link course content to newsroom needs. And that's true, of course, at most J-schools around the country. In the past several years, however, we have introduced courses in Online Journalism, Collaborative Online Producing, Cybermedia Design, Multimedia Techniques, Visual Storytelling and others. In addition, the News Sequence now requires that every skills course have at least one major multimedia component. As students get more exposure in their courses, they should have an easier transition into the newsroom.