“I only write copy”
“We don’t have a photographer”
“Video? We’re not staffed or equipped for that.”
Your days are numbered. The liberal arts crowd is steadily taking back ground which was previously overrun by the nerds and the technologists. Better tools, simpler technology, and easy-to-use software are making child’s play of once complicated tasks - breaking down the barriers to doing great storytelling online. And there aren’t many excuses for not picking up the skills contained in that great document - a document which was intended for journalists, but easily applies to web communications.
Learn it, live it, and grow. Or get accustomed becoming more irrelevant and replaceable with each passing month. The VCR comes to mind. Heck, Betamax.
“You are only as secure as your ability to find your next job.”
I like my job/employer and I hope I never get fired. But that sentence still rings in my ears. A friendly reminder to never get complacent. Never stop growing.
Every organization makes mistakes running their website; the nature of those mistakes varies, however, depending on the size and type of organization. Institutional websites are often large unwieldy creatures plagued by bureaucracy. In this talk Paul will share some of the harsh truths surrounding these websites and suggests ways to tame the beast!
…college news is a messy business. Students are learning, and their mistakes all too often show up in print. An online presence will broadcast those mistakes to the world, so the theory goes. Also, a college that supports student press freedoms when distributed to 2,000 people on campus might not be so keen to distribute “bad news” about the campus when the whole world is watching.
…Trumping all those considerations, staying offline is a disservice to student journalists who cannot use the online tools now widespread in the industry. A student who can’t put material online can’t really understand the impact of social networks like Twitter or Facebook to spread news. They can’t really understand what it is to create a personal brand. And they can’t really understand the challenges of multimedia production.
A college that will not allow their student journalists to practice online journalism in a “real world” setting is abandoning its commitment to education in order to save face. And that is a tragedy not only for the college, but for the students who look to higher education to prepare them for the future.
Bob Bergland notes a survey he conducted: “We were amazed to find that 36% of the 392 papers analyzed (random sample from the ~1,600 on the directory) did not have a web presence (defined as no site, a site with no content listed as being under construction or a site which had not been updated in over six months).”
There are two primary obstacles for getting a college newspaper online: One is relatively easy to overcome (technology), the other much harder but more crucial overall (institutional).
The MediaShift blog is always a great read. I’d highly recommend subscribing to the feed.
In the same way that communications plans, meetings, and approval chains can sometimes be the enemy of effective web work, there is also the quagmire of demanding every great feature on the first iteration.
Most often the culprit is yourself. You want the best. You want it all. You want to buy a house and keep pushing back the move-in date, until every last piece of furniture is neatly in place.
What does your website sound like? Turn off your style sheet and look at what you’ve got. Suddenly the person listening to a website with a screen reader is no longer different from you—your needs are the same. Achieving the highest level of accessibility makes a lot of sense and should be part of your design efforts for reasons you no longer need others to justify for you.
…accessibility is often assigned a low priority for the following reasons:
We would like to create accessible content, but we only have a small team.
Nobody ever really complains about inaccessibility, anyway.
Accessible sites are less aesthetically pleasing and they limit our design options.
We really don’t know what it takes to make our website/web application accessible.
Our target user group doesn’t include users with disabilities.
Of all the arguments, number four is really the only valid reason why a website or web application should have accessibility issues. You can resolve this issue—provide your web designers and developers with some minimal and gradual accessibility training, and keep the discussion alive. As for the rest…they merely require a small, but powerful shift in mindset
