Continuing on the topic of my last post, I’d like to try and frame the question more precisely. It goes like this:
Do you think that longer feature stories should be created solely for a web audience? I’m not talking about putting up an online version of a story initially meant for a printed magazine. I’m talking about straight to web.
I’d like your opinions.
The reason I’m asking, …I went around searching for other universities who go beyond the short and simple press-release mentality on the web. I went looking for great feature writing. And I found a few nice examples. A great majority though, were simply online versions of printed university magazine articles. The kind that stuck out to me were the feature stories born and bred for the web:
The University of Texas does a great job of highlighting feature stories on their homepage.
Check out the archive of all the 2008 features:
http://www.utexas.edu/features/2008/
Another great example is Mizzou Wire, from the University of Missouri.
“A lot happens here at Mizzou. Researchers and teachers virtually live in labs and classrooms and tackle topics ranging from disease to politics. Students learn, compete, volunteer, cheer and much more. Big events and big-time performers come and go. Athletes win and lose. There are plenty of stories to go around.
We’ll be telling some of those stories at Mizzou Wire, the University’s new news and features Web site. We’ll include news briefs and deeper features. We’ll tell stories in words, photos, audio and video. We’ll also share stories from the many great outlets around campus and beyond.”
I’m looking for more academic/institutional examples. Know of any?
Related:
December 18th, 2008 at 6:10 am
Duke Research is a web-only magazine published every month with stories – often multimedia – developed just for it.
Karl Bates, Duke Research Editor, will be giving in early March an encore presentation of the webinar he presented for the series Stop the Presses last June: http://higheredexperts.com/stopthepresses
December 18th, 2008 at 6:19 am
Hi Drew, good examples. I’m new to higher education so I can’t come up with any examples as good that I’ve come across but I’m certain that this is a direction that we should all be taking. I’ve been working on museum and gallery websites for the last few years and we were certainly developing in-depth web-only features.
I’m always disappointed to see links straight through to press releases on public-facing homepages. It’s become the cliched standard test for job applicants for web editor posts to ask them to take a press release and make it suitable for web, but then in reality so many organisations just dump the press release out, complete with notes for editors and press officer contact details at the bottom.
Features ‘born and bred for the web’ can do so much more than the printed magazine article, with well-researched links to high quality relevant material, the opportunity for readers to interact with feedback, addition of video, etc.
December 18th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Not to toot my own horn, but we do straight-to-web feature writing on a weekly basis at Tufts. Our archive is here:
http://www.tufts.edu/home/feature/?p=archives
The features, which are currently the main feature of the homepage at http://www.tufts.edu, are a mix of stories, slideshows, video, photo galleries and other content. There are some magazine features mixed in there, but the vast majority is original, bred-for-web feature content.
December 18th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
I know the University of Kansas has a features page, but I don’t know if this is a regurgitation of the print product (if one such exists).
http://www.features.ku.edu/
A lot of the stories seem to be “webby,” ranging from only text to only a video/photo gallery to any combination in between (and even QT 360 VR tours!). The design could be cleaned up and consolidated a bit, but you can see there is real effort to tell a story on what the university and its students are about.
December 18th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Thanks for the shout-out! We have fun doing what we do and it’s nice to be recognized for it.
December 18th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
I think it really depends what you have in-house to generate and sustain these sorts of stories. I think they’re needed and I know I’ve been at a few institutions where this has been part of the conversation, but so many schools are stretched and frankly, are so entrenched in their current processes that it can be a hard pivot to stop doing what “we know works” to allocate time and effort towards something new. I suspect that this one of those areas where the leading institutions with the wherewithal to initiate will continue to lead the way and then that will give other schools who might want to do it, enough political cover to initiate such things on their own, in the name of keeping up with the Joneses.
December 31st, 2008 at 8:21 am
Check out http://www.cmu.edu
January 6th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
At the University of Minnesota, we recently launched a new home page (www.umn.edu) and put an end to printed publications. We try to present stories now in many different ways and trying to figure out when other elements should be introduced (eg, multimedia).
Here is a feature story we just posted: http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/UR_CONTENT_088861.html
Not sure what the best approach is, as we are trying to break it down ourselves, but for the most part I think the resolution is bringing multiple elements together.