Sponsored content finding a niche in college media marketing

By Matthew Salzano
Pacific Lutheran University

Consumers of Colorado State’s Rocky Mountain Collegian recently learned how to build a bar. A Ft. Collin’s liquor store owner told a freshly 21-year-old student just what to buy — from his store! — to have a classier selection in a college home than just whatever beer was cheap that week. The landing page for the video is marked with bold text, declaring it “SPONSORED CONTENT.” Sponsored content is the long-form version of advertising content that is known as native advertising.

Traditionally, ads stand out due to the difference in their form from editorial content—a quarter page ad looks different than a op-ed or reportage. With native advertising, however, the paid content looks like it natively inhabits to the platform it exists on: the liquor store video is only distinguishable from editorial video content due to that all-caps label.

The practice that was once only seen from large media outlets like Buzzfeed or the Guardian has made it to college newsrooms. Native advertising, especially creating sponsored content, poses challenges and opportunities for college newsrooms to educate and prepare students while serving clientele. Continue reading “Navigating Native Advertising in College Media”

Advisers say honor groups create space for service, engagement, and recognition of excellence

By Lindsey Wotanis
Marywood University

College media advisers have a lot on their plates.

They’re doing their best, day in and out, to train the next generation of journalists–a difficult task at a time when the free press is constantly under attack and when more and more university public relations teams are working overtime to control their schools’ images.

The thought of incorporating something else into the mix might be overwhelming. But adding an honor society has the potential to pay dividends for advisers, students and campus communities who are in the trenches engaged in everyday collegiate media work.

Chapters can motivate students and reward excellent work

One of the most obvious benefits of starting an honor society chapter is the opportunities it affords for rewarding outstanding work.

Some societies, like Lambda Pi Eta, which is the official honor society of the National Communication Association, honor communication students who excel academically. Students earning a 3.0 overall GPA and a 3.25 major GPA are invited to join. The National Broadcasting Society/Alpha Epsilon Rho (NBS/AERho), a society geared toward students in broadcasting and other electronic media, has similar GPA requirements for new members.

Continue reading “Adding an honor society to the mix”

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Jay Hartwell, Fulbright scholar and CMA member, reflects on what he brought to Vietnam—and what he learned

Jay Hartwell has been advising student media programs at the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus since 1997 after working eight years as a general assignment reporter in Honolulu and six years researching and writing a book about contemporary native Hawaiian culture. In 2013-2014, he received a 10-month, Fulbright Scholar grant to set up a student media program at Hue University in Vietnam. College Media Review spoke with him about the experience and his interest in Vietnam.

CMR: What prompted your interest in Vietnam?

Hartwell: I returned to Hawaii to work as a journalist in 1980 but never traveled to Asia until spring break in 2012, when my own children were grown up and out of the house. For three weeks, I stayed with a Vietnamese family whose daughter my family had hosted in Honolulu six summers earlier. I spent all my time in Hue in central Vietnam, because I wanted to learn more than I could by city hopping. While helping the family at its private school for three weeks, I asked their daughter to accompany me to Hue University of Sciences that has a journalism program. Through her translation, they requested a lecture on Hawaii journalism education for their 400 students. I put one together in a few days and during the Q&A, a student asked, “How are we supposed to get jobs if we don’t have any experience?”

That’s when I got the idea for a Fulbright grant and a Hue workshop during the upcoming Christmas break. I had 15 years with experiential learning through my university’s student media program. Our staffers get internships and jobs. Vietnam uses lectures to teach students who need/want hands-on experience to get jobs. I proposed a two-week, news magazine workshop for the Hue students during Christmas, then setting up a student media program through newspaper and magazine production classes at Hue University through the Fulbright Scholar program. The workshop succeed; Fulbright accepted; Hue agreed to have me with modifications to the proposal, and the process began in August 2013 when I moved in with the family whose daughter we had hosted.

Continue reading “Reflections on a learning experience in Vietnam”

Author: news not in crisis; way journalists are trained is

By Carolyn Schurr Levin
Stony Brook University

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In his enlightening and forward thinking book, “Beyond News: The Future of Journalism,” Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism at New York University, argues with great conviction that after “more than a century and a half of selling the latest facts, journalists need to sell something else.”

There is “not much of a living in hawking that which is given away free” on the Internet, Stephens continues. Because facts, news and information are pouring out on “our laptops, our tablets, our smart phones,” the era when humankind “hungered after information, after facts, after news,” has ended, Stevens argues. And, so, he concludes, we must now train and allow our best journalists to provide “a wise take on what’s going on,” what he aptly calls “wisdom journalism” – journalism that strengthens our understanding of the world.

Stephens forcefully argues that it’s not the news that is in crisis. It’s the way that journalists are trained to collect and present that news.

“Like a lot of ideas,” Stephens said in a recent interview with the College Media Review, the idea of wisdom journalism “challenges something that we take for granted, which is what journalism is and does,” the 19^th and 20th century notion that journalists are primarily collectors of facts. He questions “the continued clinging to this notion,” because, he writes, “Newspapers, newsreels, and newscasts . . . rank high among the forces that spurred modernism and postmodernism in the 20th century.” Continue reading “Book Review: ‘Beyond News: The Future of Journalism’”

How College Media Can Plan For the Worst

By Carolyn Schurr Levin

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In December 2012, College Media Review reported about the effects of Hurricane Sandy on the Pioneer at LIU Post on Long Island, and the College Voice at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey.  Both campuses shut down, students were sent home, power was lost for days and publishing the student newspapers was, to put it mildly, a challenge.

In the case of the Pioneer, the outside printing company for the newspaper couldn’t have printed the paper even if it had had power; it lost its roof to the storm. The 2012 CMR article, “When Disaster Strikes A College Community,” advised college media organizations to make contingency plans in the event of an unanticipated catastrophe similar to Hurricane Sandy.

Yet, over a year later, an informal email survey of college media advisers suggests that many organizations do not yet have such contingency plans.

Continue reading “Being prepared when calamity strikes…”