Status Report: Online Campus Media

Thank you, Bryan Murley, for your MediaShift update on one of my favorite journalism topics, the evolution of online campus media. In “College Media Has Come a Long Way Online” Murley provides links to a number of innovative online operations on campuses nationwide.

It’s instructive to see what the next generation of journalists is doing out there. What surprised me was that 36 percent of college newspapers are not yet online, according to a sampling done by Bob Bergland, a professor at Missouri Western State University. What are they waiting for?!

As our own students at the Commuter have discovered since launching their improved Web site this past summer, having an immediate and seemingly limitless outlet for their journalistic and creative endeavors is not only strengthening their skills as journalists but building a new and exciting “community of interest” at Linn-Benton Community College.

It’s exciting to see students engaged in trying new forms of expression and discovering that journalism is alive and well, despite what they’ve been led to believe by some of the old-timers in the profession.

-rp-

(Photo credit: “Media Training” by noodlepie, courtesy of Flickr.com)