Bob Stepno: Knoxville

Journalism education group honors Tennessee & Elon profs.

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:37:25 GMT

The AEJMC Newspaper Division's spring and summer newsletters are now online, including plenty of news:

National faculty awards for professors Dorothy Bowles at UT Knoxville and Janna Quitney Anderson at Elon University (see page 3 of that PDF newsletter)
A call for discussion of changing the Newspaper Division's name to reflect changes in members' research and in the converged news industry itself. (As I mentioned on the division home page, what was once the International Newspaper Marketing Association, now uses the word "Newsmedia" in its name, but other groups like the Newspaper Association of America and American Society of Newspaper Editors still emphasize their roots. The American Press Institute is still around, too, along with its Newspaper Next project.)
Listings of conference paper presentations and forums at the annual AEJMC Convention, which will be in Chicago next month.

AEJMC is the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, which consists of 17 divisions, 10 special interest groups and 2 commissions, all providing newsletters, research competitions and convention programming.

NAA forecasts newspaper trends for 2008, lists digital award finalist

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 19:53:46 GMT

Online readings about dead-tree and born-again-online news media:

PRESSTIME, as its home page asserts, is the "flagship publication of the Newspaper Association of America," aimed at news. circulation and advertising executives. It also could be good reading for journalism and media studies students.

From this year's first issue, the 5,000-word cover story has more to do with advertising, circulation, toxic waste, cost-cutting and consolidation... but the closing item does mention the trend in "hyperlocal" coverage as one of 8 Trends to Track in [base ']08

Other January 2008 articles worth reading:

St. Petersburg Times profile: Finding Success by Challenging the Norm
Susan Clark Johnson on the Free Flow of Information Act protecting reporters and their confidential sources, as long as the reporters haven't been "consolidated" out of their jobs.
Rob Curley on Building a Better Newspaper Web Site (oops... that was from the December issue)

The NAA site also lists the finalists for the Digital Edge Awards, given for online publishing issues including multimedia and interactive storytelling. Among the nominees: my old friends at the Knoxville News Sentinel (http://knoxnews) in several categories, and the local Roanoke Times (http://roanoke.com) for its multimedia coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings last April. The Times won a "best overall news site" award last year among papers its size.

New Knox Looks at Knox News

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 06:21:32 GMT

Nice Django/Ellington harmonizing of local breaking news and clean page presentation in the new Knoxville News Sentinel http://knoxnews website design... I especially like the longer story summaries and clearer headlines out front. (Never cared much for the rotating earlier version's image/headlines atop the front page, pretty or not, and I've been picking on the too-short headlines for what seems like years.)

Randy and the other folks at KnoxViews, your independent blogging forum community whatchamacallit, seem to be giving the new look a thumbs up. For me, the main remaining annoyance is the use of animated, scrolling and video ads. Baptist Hospital is a fine place, but I don't think the above-the-fold ad helps its image. I just don't like to have things on my screen scroll, flip or talk withoug asking me first. How about selling the hospital and other advertisers on the community-service idea of "sponsoring" some news in that space?

To balance the focus on hyperlocal news, the sponsored Box could offer a "Today's Biggest Stories" list. I was perhaps too amused by the fact that the time-stamp-order of items featured all three fiery stories for a while Thursday afternoon: thrift store afire, dog afire, Buck Shank no longer afire. But I also noticed how easy it was to push the whole browser window off my screen to the right, hiding the hospital ad.

The sponsorship box could be a set of tabs including the "most mailed" and "most commented" tabs KnoxNews already has on its News page...and a nice little "brought to you by..." credit underneath in bright UT orange.

Back to headlines: Am I the only one who did a double take at the front page headline, "Marshal: New Hope Thrift Stores fire was arson," thinking, "why would a marshal's new hope be that a thrift store fire was arson?"
Strange the things that cross your mind sometime. For more well-thought out discussion of the new design, see Jack Lail's story and attached comments, his blog entry with past-version screen shots, Michael Silence's blog with more reader comments, and Jay Small's background on Scripps site conversions.

It must have been an incredible amount of work getting such a complex site reorganized and republished without missing a day. Between the additional story summaries, comment fields on all the stories, the breaking local-news emphasis, more video, and prominently placed blog and vlog links, knoxnews is hitting most of the current trends in news site design. Shifting a site like that reminds me of some college president's comment that moving a university was as hard as moving a graveyard.

Since I'm moving to a new university, I guess I'll be doing more paying more attention to the Roanoke Times, and BigLickU.com. But I'll wait until I get there and go back to boxing books for now.