In the comments on that post, Dave Lee wrote: “Blogging – and online journalism as a whole – at Lincoln has been seriously lacking.” I can personally vouch for this. Whilst there have been some encouraging developments, much of the practice and teaching is still rotten.

Across the course, a serious look needs to be taken at every aspect of how online journalism is taught, what the flaws are with the current situation, and what can be done to improve things. I offered Bullet Magazine such a review of their website at the end of December, and I’ll take a similar approach here.

Contents

This post is really, incredibly long. 3,000 words long. To help if you want to skip through, here’s a linked table of contents:

• Summary
• Defining “online journalism”
• Current online teaching at Lincoln
  • The introduction is ill
  • Broadcast is best
  • Pathetic print
  • Online on its own
    • Second year
    • Third year
• How to improve “online journalism” at Lincoln
  • An improved introduction
  • Better broadcast
    • Doing more
    • Setting strict standards
  • Preferable print
  • Oust online
    • Journalists don’t need to know HTML
• Conclusion

The short version

Because the real thing is so long, here’s the short version. (Skip this if you’re going to read the whole thing.)

“Online journalism” teaching is in a bad way at the University of Lincoln, with different production modules teaching different things, and the existence of a separate and useless “on-line journalism production” module.

Students aren’t taught anything meaningful in their first year, and online is dismissed as “blogging”. Meanwhile, the second- and third- year print modules’ online aspects consist of a static Dreamweaver template. The second-year online module also focuses on Dreamweaver. There seems to be no consistent approach in the TV production modules, for any year.

Radio production is the most advanced, and the other production modules should take their cue from Gary Stevens’s work. He has set up a WordPress site that students post work to. Unfortunately, this is not used as comprehensively as it should be, and most content is posted by the third-year radio students.

To improve matters the separate online modules should be scrapped. Very few students take these. The useful material should be taught to the first-year students, and an emphasis should be placed on teaching them the basic of online — including using WordPress. Students should be encouraged or even forced to use this as a way of breeding familiarity with the tools and techniques required.

This will then support more advanced and complex practices in the second and third years, where production modules should adopt WordPress and have students publish all of their production work online. Increased familiarity will also help students contribute to current debates on online journalism and its uses — hyperlocal news websites, for example.

The importance of the internet to today and tomorrow’s media requires that a robust and thorough online journalism education program be implemented. The current situation cannot be allowed to continue.

Open the Oxford, crack the Collins (A definition)

When I talk about “online journalism” I’ll be specifically referring to production, and nothing else. There is a lot of stuff that you could include with “online journalism”: just look at all the topics covered by Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism Blog.

In this post I am solely concerned with getting students’ stories on the web.

Current online teaching at Lincoln

Right now, the approach that the School is taking is in a bit of a mess. Different specialisms get taught different things. Depending on the modules students take in their second year they’ll get taught different things, and there’s still a separate online unit.

Because of how compartmentalised this is it makes sense to go through each part individually.

The introduction is ill

There isn’t much of an introduction to the basics of online journalism, and what’s given is poor. In the first year students are set a blogging assignment, mentioned above. In a comment on my recent post about it, Charlotte Reid recalled the lecture given by Bernie Russell, the tutor in charge of the online module, on the topic.

Broadcast is best

Thanks to the work of Gary Stevens¹, a radio tutor, the broadcast modules include a good level of online publishing. Radio newsdays publish their work to lsjnews.co.uk, accompanying their audio reports with small bits of introductory copy, and occasionally with pictures.

The work of the third-year radio students, “CityVibe@5”, is currently the only content that is regularly uploaded. In another comment Charlotte Reid explained the situation for the second-year radio students:

The first few weeks of radio newsdays we did the online part. As radio is influenced by Gary Stevens we used wordpress and did upload audio, pictures (that we’d taken ourselves) and copy. But our radio group is so small that it was dropped, even the required element in our portfolio.

Also, some work from the television students is also available on the site. The videos are hosted on an associated YouTube account, and embedded into posts. There are only eight video posts up, so it seems as if this isn’t a consistent practice. Even so, the arrangement is there and the only work left to do is export, upload, and post the video packages.

Charlotte Reid again:

TV in year one we would upload the video to Youtube and link it up to some copy etc on wordpress. From the sounds of it though they don’t in year two because of copyright issues.

The site is a little rough around the edges, but nothing that cannot be easily fixed. I’ve told Gary in person how impressed by it I am, and as such the recommendations below will be minor.

Pathetic print

In the second- and third-year print news module there is an “online” component, but it barely deserves being described as such. Students are required to fill out a Dreamweaver template with that day’s stories. “Fill out” is exactly the right description, as it’s more like filling out a tax return than publishing journalism on the internet.

If you take a look for yourselves, you can perhaps appreciate how dire the situation is. Some “standards”² are applied — each headline must be six words long, and each excerpt 15 — but it is not enough. Particularly annoying are the wildly different picture sizes. Let’s go through the stories and look at the sizes, from top to bottom: (All sizes are in pixels, width first and height second.)

1. 200×100
2. 105×116
3. 101×100
4. 100×100 (The six bottom stories’ pictures are this size.)

Because of the way the dreamweaver template works, the pictures have to be cropped and resized before they’re imported. If you insert a larger picture the box will expand and destroy the layout.

What’s even worse is that, since these are the same stories that appear on the tabloid page, there are usually only about three pictures. This means the less ridiculous 100×100 image boxes often don’t get used.

The “online” requirement — which doesn’t require the person filling out the page to be online — is a joke, and clearly an afterthought (and as such is an afterthought during the newsdays). I expect there was a meeting where it was discussed how to incorporate online journalism into the module, and Roger, Tim, or Bernie suggested this.

I don’t do the magazine module, but it seems that things are just as bad that side of the fence.

Due to the laughable state its in now, the suggestions are more extreme than for broadcast.

Online on its own

Separate to the online journalism teaching included (or not) in the other modules, there is a “On-line journalism production” option. In the second year this combines with a 12-week photography unit to form a whole-year module, while it’s a full, two-semester module for third-year students.

Second year

Put simply, it’s teaching the wrong things. Fundamentally, it is approaching the subject from the wrong direction.

The actual production involved in the unit is focused on producing static content, and much of what’s learned is in aid of that. From the unit handbook (.pdf), one of the five “expected learning outcomes”:

At the end of the semester, you should: […] * be able to design and mark-up a web site by writing HTML, and by using a web authoring program;

Students are introduced to content management systems (CMS), but only briefly. The focus is on Dreamweaver, and that’s what is taught. Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver.

I have no opinion on Dreamweaver as a program. I’m not a web designer. But it’s not a good fit for “on-line journalism production”. It produces static pages and static websites.

The WordPress codex says: “[t]he problem with purely static pages is that they are difficult to maintain.” And a site made out of them just doesn’t work when you trying to get news up quickly and easily.

Thankfully it is not required that the assessed site be created in Dreamweaver (my group’s site was done on WordPress). But Dreamweaver is what’s taught.

Each group has to “design and build a Web site covering a particular area of interest as part of a group project.” If you’re thinking this could mean a whole range of things — a site all about horses, for instance — then you’re right. (Last year, one group did create a site all about horses.) There’s very little that’s journalistic about the whole thing.

Third year

Things get a little more sensible for third-year students that take the online module, which runs through both semesters. One of the “expected learning outcomes” is that students “should… be able to use a content management system to host, manage and display your material”. This is encouraging.

Whereas the second-year program is outdated, the third-year one (.doc) is far more up-to-date. But the question here is why is it on its own, away from all of the other modules? It teaches things that all students should know, not just the 20 people who choose to continue with online in their final year.

The king is dead. We’re all the king (Improving things)

Thinking about writing this post was hard. It was hard because I was thinking of how to change and improve the current set-up, a part of which is a separate online module in the journalism course. This is completely unnecessary.

Going forward, there shouldn’t be a separate module for teaching these skills because they should be taught to all journalism students. The internet — and publishing news on it — is just that important. No matter what they’ve decided to specialise in, all journalism students should know how to put their work online. There is no such thing as an “online” journalist. We should all be “online” journalists, and all students should be taught those things that are reserved for the “online” module — the parts that are relevant and useful, anyway.

Below I’ll go through each specialism again, looking at what needs to be done to improve their online teaching.

An improved introduction

Teaching online journalism needs to start with the course. The internet is incredibly important to all media now, and the first-year teaching should reflect that.

First-year student Jonathan Cresswell mentioned that there is a little of this at present:

As I’ve yet to be taught much online journalism, as I’ve only been here for one semester so far, (except in a lecture by Gary Stevens who was talking about convergence, and showing great examples of how online can be used to good effect)[…]

Gary deserves some sort of award. This is what needs to be done. But not only telling students, but teaching them too. Right now it is being dismissed as “blogging”. It’s not just blogging. It’s publishing.

The internet enables cheap (or free) publishing, allowing previously un- or underserved communities to share information quickly and easily. You know this. I know this. The LSJ (should) know this.

So why not act on what we know?

Right alongside their basic writing, first-year students should be taught how to publish on the web. It’s easy, so it can be taught quickly. And by getting in early you’re building skills that will be useful throughout the course (and throughout students’ lives and careers).

Start with WordPress. It’s a very simple and easy-to-use CMS. It is also very powerful — and by getting students to use it early on they’ll hopefully be tapping into much of that power by their third year.

Teach it as a tool. That’s all it is. Get students comfortable with it. You could even require that students publish their copy on WordPress blogs for assessment (and if there are any legal worries, just have them password-protected).

The important thing is first-year students are taught about publishing to the internet, that they are taught thoroughly, and they get familiar with doing it. These basic online skills underpin everything else that you could possibly want to have students do later on in their course.

Better broadcast

The broadcast people are already way ahead of everyone else. There are only two things they need to do: 1) more, 2) apply rigid standards.

Doing more

Everything needs to go up. For radio, save as an .mp3 and upload it to an audio hosting site. Embed the player, and you’re all set.

But more people need to be involved. From the author names on lsjnews.co.uk it seems like one person gets stuck with putting everything online. It’s a waste of that person’s time. Sharing the workload will probably be faster, and increases familiarity with the workflow. Everyone should be responsible for uploading their own content.

TV is a trickier one (as video is more time-consuming to produce and upload, and harder to work with). Early on, students should be made familiar with websites such as The Real News Network to show the possibilities for video on the web. With Vimeo and YouTube, the tools for hosting video content are well advanced, and embedding video is fairly simple and straightforward.

I’d imagine the time it takes to export the video as a usable format, and the time it takes to upload and be processed by the hosting website would be the hindering factor here. But getting the video news produced by students online should be an aim.

Setting strict standards

This is relatively straightforward. Whoever has the keys to lsjnews.co.uk should see what their current WordPress theme will tolerate in terms of headline length, excerpt length, picture sizes, picture requirements, etc.

This information should be used to draw up a set of requirements that each story published should meet (headline between 20 and 25 characters long, for example). This will help improve the consistency of the website, and sort out any visual problems there are currently.

Headlines and excerpts should be specified in character lengths, rather than in words (as it’s more specific; words can be long or short).

Preferable print

Use WordPress. Bang. Problem solved.

Well, sort of.

There should be no mucking around with Dreamweaver templates. I mean, just look how awful the newspaper one is! We have to deal with that every newsday.

It’s also really awkward, as one person gets stuck with it, and everyone has to either send over their stories or dictate headlines and excerpts to the person doing the page.

Everyone should be responsible for their own stories. So, here’s a thought: set up a WordPress site, give everyone an account, and have them do it themselves. A side benefit is that you end up with a working website, and not a rubbish-looking, completely-fake piece of static HTML.

Even if you don’t overhaul the way print newsdays work (a topic for another day), this makes things far simpler and easier, and a lot more realistic. WordPress may not be like any news organisation’s CMS — I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never seen one — but I’m sure it’s far closer to reality than mocking up a static front page.

As with broadcast, there should be strict standards in place. The current template has a version of this, but they should all be scrapped, as they don’t make any sense and wouldn’t transfer over.

Oust online

Just bin it. There’s a fair bit of the current teaching that is just out of date and/or unnecessary. What is relevant should be taught elsewhere — in the other modules, or during the first year.

There’s not a lot else to say on this, other than it makes no sense to have it as a separate module. Doing so is actually detrimental to the online teaching that should be present throughout the other production modules.

Journalists don’t need to know HTML

A common complaint I hear from journalism students struggling with their law assessments is “if I wanted to be a lawyer I would have taken a law degree”. But law is essential for journalists, in the same way the highway code is essential for drivers.

If a student wanted to be a web designer they would have taken a web design course. Unlike law, knowing how to code a website is not essential for any journalist who wants to publish on the internet. There are suites of tools that come with either complete designs or automate the process.

I believe that students should know how to do basic things in HTML, but it is not essential, and often better results can be achieved with tools that don’t require such knowledge.

For example, this whole website runs on WordPress, and uses a template designed by someone else. I did not even attempt to build it myself. Even basic visual markup — <em>, <strong>, and so on — isn’t needed. I’m writing this in Markdown³, and WordPress includes a visual editor, which appears to the user to alter text in the same way a word processor does.

Here’s a comment from Mindy McAdams, whom I agree with on the topic. A brief excerpt:

[T]he amount of [CSS & HTML] that journalism students need to know is really quite small. I think we should aim more for exposure and basic comprehension[…]

And you may as well do that in the first year, while you’re focusing on something else. Perhaps while teaching the basics of how a WordPress theme is constructed, and which template documents control which user-facing elements.

Conclusion

The Lincoln School of Journalism need to radically overhaul the way they think about online, and the way they teach their students about it.

Online should be incorporated into the other production units, and students should be taught how to actually use the tools in their first year. This is extremely important because it is the foundation for doing anything more complex, and publishing on the internet is so important now that not teaching it straight away is inexcusable.

At a specific level, tutors should focus on using WordPress as the standard online publishing tool because it is free, quick to teach, easy to use, and immensely powerful. It should be thoroughly incorporated into the three production modules and used throughout the three-year course.

An academic year later, and it doesn’t look as if anything’s changed. In a comment on my post about blogging assignments Mindy McAdams wrote:

[I]f they treat it as a class assignment… they will never understand blogging, will they?

I have taken it for granted that assigning students to create and keep a blog is the best way to get them to under tand blogging. But maybe there is a better way.

I’ve got no idea whether any of the staff at Lincoln read that post, but I doubt it. Here’s what the “Journalism Skills” unit handbook for first-year Lincoln journalism students says on blogging:

***Blogging — You will be required to produce a blog with at least six entries. You will receive instructions on these requirements in the lecture devoted to blogging by Bernie Russell in week four (February 17). The blog will be handed in by 4pm on Thursday April 15 (Week 10). You will hand in a copy of the blog address (the URL) on an A4 sheet of paper, which also also contains your name and student number, YOU WILL ALSO email the blog address and your name and student number to Bernie Russell and Roger De Bank by 4pm on Thursday April 15 (Week 10). This represents 15% of your Semester B marks. [Their emphases.]

The comment I made about the requirements for last year’s first-year students still applies: “That isn’t blogging as self-motivated publishing. That’s work.”

I’d be very interested to hear what Bernie says in his February 17th lecture, but I’m not especially hopeful he’ll fill students with a passion for blogging.

In my retrospective of how the first topic went, I was very pessimistic about the chances of increasing involvement, and dismissed it as yet another case of my 90/10 rule on student effort.¹

Just a small town girl

After I posted, Andy Hickley emailed me some comments. Andy has given me permission to reprint his thoughts here, and I think they’re illuminating about why LSJ bloggers is in the state it is, and what could be done to improve things.

Whilst having a blog ring is very simple and easy, i think it’s basically the subject of it that led many people to completely ignore writing up an article – i don’t know how relevant hyperlocal journalism is in the world, but it’s not a phrase i’ve ever heard uttered before.

Naturally a lot of people just aren’t gonna be interested in writing or reading a blog about something they don’t care so much about. Maybe we should start with softer topics at the beginning of the LSJ phenomenon that slowly work their way up to harder views? Thus my suggestion for the next one would be about what people’s plans and dream jobs are after graduation – whilst hardly groundbreaking, it’d at least be readable and help the general public to find out more about the individual bloggers personalities, which might help them come back when we talk about something a little over their heads?

Also whilst i’m slowly growing more to love Twitter, i’m fairly certain that journalism students who use it are in the minority, maybe getting some Facebook updates (even if it’s just a status or something from you), or asking Sam Pidioux to email round updates and reminders to contribute like she did when the thing got created, might get some attention and contributions?

Just a city boy

I think Andy’s views are far closer to those of the “average” journalism student than anything I, or Shane, or Daniel, or Josh might write.

i don’t know how relevant hyperlocal journalism is in the world, but it’s not a phrase i’ve ever heard uttered before.

This example is incredibly revealing. Andy isn’t thick by any means, but hyperlocal is a “big thing” in the media world right now, to the point where my natural instinct is not to link to any sources because I assume that the people reading this already know about it.

What needs to be considered is that a lot of the things I take for granted don’t figure for most of the students on the journalism course at Lincoln (and perhaps a majority across the UK). The people who know about this stuff, and read and write about it, and use Twitter (etc.), as Andy points out, are in the minority.

But to the people in this minority it all seems very natural and ordinary — “You’re not on Twitter? Really?” — and I think this also carries over into blogging. With regards to potential topics for LSJ bloggers, I subconsciously assumed that people who had a blog would be “in the know” when it came to the prevailing discussions of the future of journalism — hyperlocal being an example.

It’s a census year

So now we have two distinct groups which I’m going to define as “those who know”, and “those that don’t”, at the risk of sounding condescending.

What really excited me about LSJ bloggers when I was setting it up was that it could be an unparalleled venue for discussing the future of journalism, and other major issues facing the trade — it would look at national and international trends in journalism with the ability to apply them to a shared, local situation. It could easily combine lofty theory and on-the-ground practice.

I hope this explains why I wanted it to be a place where we could easily discuss things such as hyperlocal journalism, because we could take the theory, and think about how we could apply it — the city of Lincoln would provide a common foundation and testing ground for a variety of ideas.

But this assumes that the people taking part in the discussion are part of the first group — “those who know”. Unfortunately the majority of journalism students aren’t in that category, at least at Lincoln.²

Move to the suburbs?

That’s the situation. It may not be ideal, but it’s what we’ve got to work with. So how can we alter LSJ bloggers to draw more people in, and be more active once they are?

I think the most important thing is what topics we discuss. Implementation and notification are secondary issues — posting notifications on Facebook (etc.) is a secondary thing, whereas topic selection is fundamental.

I still completely reject the line of thought put forward by Darren Moss, because it ignores our constituency: journalism students at Lincoln.

We need lightweight journalism-related topics, it seems. That, combined with a different system of notification and advertising, may prove enough to get more journalism students involved. Topics should be interesting, journalism-related, but shouldn’t sound like the quantum physics of journalism. They should be things that people already have some kind of opinion on, so that it doesn’t seem like a lot of effort to develop and voice it.

It’s time to have a think. If things go well, LSJ bloggers may be relaunched for semester B.

Here’s the video of John Pilger discussing “why journalism matters” with Professor Richard Keeble of the Lincoln School of Journalism. It took place on Monday, October 12th 2009.

It’s taken forever to get sorted, and the video quality & the camera work isn’t the best, but it’s the whole talk, including the Q&A at the end.

If you’d like to read it, here’s my email interview with Pilger.

The University of Lincoln’s press office beat me (quite substantially) in publishing a write-up of Dorothy Byrne’s talk at the university last week. It’s a decent article, though Ian writes consistently good copy so that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

But what is interesting is… it’s missing half the people who were part of the talk last week. There isn’t a single mention of Mike Jempson, director of Mediawise, who shared the stage with Byrne.

Update: 11.40pm, December 1st, 2009

My copy’s available here. I’ve focused on Jempson because he had more interesting things to say, and I’ll leave the press office to write about Byrne’s pathetic defence.

Update: 1.20pm, January 25th, 2010

I’ve just spoke to Jenny Sheriston from the press office. Apparently she wrote the copy, and excluded Jempson because Byrne was more interesting, and she considers Byrne to be one of the most important women in broadcasting.

I didn’t write this at the time, but it was the reason for my concern of Jempson’s exclusion: Byrne is is a prominent figure in the dominant media, and so has fairly easy access to other dominant media organisations.

Outside pressure groups, like Jempson’s [Mediawise][ws], often have great difficulty getting attention for their critique of the media, and those with more radical views are often ignored completely.

We should bring attention to marginalised views, and not just focus on the powerful.

Official announcement that John Pilger’s archive will be built and maintained by the University of Lincoln.

It’s a rough edit of the audio I recorded on Monday, and I’ve basically just cut out the spikes & normalised the volume.

In speaking order, it features John Tulloch, head of the Lincoln School of Journalism, Mike Saks, a senior pro vice-chancellor at the university, and John Pilger.

(Note: The reason why you can hear tapping sounds is because I was holding my phone underneath my shorthand notebook. If anyone wants the audio file, or a transcript, just email me.)

By Rob J Wells

Welcome to LSJ bloggers. I’ve set this site up to provide a place where journalism students at the University of Lincoln can get together and discuss topics to blog about, and to assemble a directory of students’ blogs.

The skeleton — this site — is in place, but the rest of how it’s going to work needs to be decided by the students who are going to take part.

The idea and implementation of LSJ bloggers owes a huge debt to Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists over at Journalism.co.uk. TNTJ is a way for young journalists around the world to get together and debate the future of journalism.

LSJ bloggers is meant to be similar, but with a much tighter focus — students at Lincoln — and the topics will be whatever students want. The other main goal for the site is to “remove the futility of blogging”, and make blogging a worthwhile activity for students.

To make this work it needs the active support of students, but doesn’t require a lot of individual effort. All you have to do is say what you’d like to write about, talk it over with your peers, and then we’ll all go away and write about it.

If you have comments or questions, please either leave an answer at the end of this post, or email lsjbloggers@gmail.com.

You can read the initial proposal for LSJ bloggers here.

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Technical details

LSJ bloggers runs on Tumblr. This makes everything very simple and easy to use.

To submit posts, students can go to the submission page. The submission page is set up for link posts only. The idea is that students will post on their own blogs first, and then submit the link and either the full post or an excerpt of it.

If you have a Tumblr account, you can also become a member of LSJ bloggers, which will give you access to the site’s dashboard. If not, then there’s no real advantage to doing so — using the submission page is just as easy and straightforward.

---

Any questions or comments?

It is incredibly important that I get feedback on this idea. If you have any thoughts or ideas at all I really want to hear them.

I wrote the skeleton of this post at the same time as my ode to Tumblr. Whereas that involved something new, this takes an old concept and applies it where it might make some difference.

Ladies and gentlemen, I propose a Lincoln student blog ring.

How sexy is that. Not very, right?

An explanation

Right now the problem seems to be that there was no real purpose or drive to many of the blogs set up by Lincoln journalism students ((By the way, if you know of any please could you send me the link – unless very few people were set the assignment, I probably don’t know about most of the blogs. Email me, send me an @reply on Twitter, leave a comment, whatever. I’d greatly appreciate it.)), other than to fulfil some arbitrary criteria. There are some exceptions to this but, as I wrote previously, not many.

One of the big things about blogging is meant to be community and conversation. “Meant to be” because I’m kind of sceptical about how important that element is, hence why in my earlier post about getting blogging again I simply stressed putting things on the internet in a new form (though they’re not necessarily new).

But this presupposes a familiarity and comfort level with blogging itself, a confidence in sharing ideas, and a belief that what you’re doing is, or could be, worthwhile. ((The definition of worthwhile is horrendously subjective. On this domain alone I use two meanings:

• Fun and/or interesting, and something that someone might value (the notebook); and,
• The product of consideration and effort, that might be conversation- and/or thought-provoking (the front page).

))

Creating something purely or even largely for academic assessment usually doesn’t create a strong attachment or feeling that it is worthwhile. (To you, and not just to your grades.)

A proposal

It’s quite simple: create a blog ring for Lincoln journalism students.

This would involve setting up a dedicated site ((Or the co-operation of an existing one, but I am not keen on that idea in the least.)). Having a single location where people can go for information and links to their peers would be incredibly valuable.

I believe this would help people feel that their efforts are not wasted, and would give them a reason to view blogging as worthwhile. It helps solve a big problem with the medium: that of “blogging into the abyss”.

I need to mention the university too: hopefully this will work well enough that whenever blogging is mentioned on the course this is also mentioned. The worst thing that could happen is that students don’t get involved. If they do, then they’re adding to the discussion. Hopefully it’ll be a lively one.

How it would work

A site would be set up, using WordPress. It would contain a list of all the students involved, and links to their blogs. It would feature news and announcements about the group, such as the month’s topic, and links to, or reposts of, responses to the topic.

It would also allow for discussion about the whole project.

This last point is crucial.

I may have suggested the idea, but it absolutely cannot be controlled by any one person or group of people. To work at all it requires the input and feedback of those it serves.

A request

This is just an idea right now. But I want this to happen as the benefits are too big to ignore.

I DESPERATELY NEED FEEDBACK AND COMMENTS ON THIS

I can’t stress that enough. And I want ideas from anyone and everyone.

Original WordPress comments:

Shane Croucher:

I like the idea and I’m definitely game for getting involved. The only thing is – are there enough of us who regularly update our blogs for this to happen? Or, even, are there enough of us who blog at all?

I agree that having something like what you’ve proposed would be the inspiration/encouraging factor for people to keep their blogs fresh. I think it would remove the futility of blogging for many of us.

I’m optimistic it could work and I think having a central point whereby we can see all of the updates, news etc would definitely improve hits/comments on each of the participants’ blogs.

Rob Wells:

I think there are enough people, and I’d be encouraging third-year journalism students (like myself), and others who are already relatively active, to pitch in and make it as vibrant as possible so we can get off to a quick start.

Elizabeth Fish:

I think this is a good idea! it would not only be good on a social level, but ideas for the individual could come out from what others are talking about.

The only problem is the counter of the above- idea stealing- and maybe being more reserved about the topics you write about, especially uni based topics. I guess that comes under idea stealing.

Overall though I like the idea, especially for those that take blogging and online journalism more seriously, and as Shane mentioned, make me more likely to update mine!

Shane Croucher:

Well it all sounds good to me, so keep me in the loop.

Daniel Ionescu:

A Lincoln student blog ring idea is great and as you said, quite easy to implement (and cheap). The only problem I can see so far is the number of Lincoln students actually blogging. We both know Rob that only a handful of students are actually blogging (separately from their course blogs) — as Shane politely mentioned.

But to add to your idea, perhaps a WordPress MU installation with BuddyPress would create a better platform that could encourage others to blog and socialise at the same time. Think about it: if freshers create a blog they can get connected to other like-minded colleagues (maybe based on theri uni email), and put their work out there also. If an arrangement with the university could make those blogs useful for their coursework as well, the better.

Rob Wells:

On the tech stuff:

Technical details can, and will, be worked out later. But we need to be extremely cautious about being too tech- and feature-heavy.

Whilst I can see the justification for things like BuddyPress, I don’t think they’re needed.

Adding extra features (and, therefore, extra complexity) would harm the main aim of providing a very simple service that encourages Lincoln journalism students to blog regularly.

We don’t need to provide a fully-featured social arena for people. They have other tools for that.

We just need to help give some meaning to students’ blogging.

On students blogging:

It’s true, there are very few students blogging. I only know of a few, but then again I only know of a few in total.

Those that currently blog fairly regularly will necessarily have to provide the ‘spark’ at the beginning, and hopefully we’ll manage to a) pull people in who did blog, but have stopped; and, b) retain those who start blogging as part of their course.

I think this latter part holds the most interest for me, because if we give a reason to keep blogging, away from the requirements of the course, then over time that will help strengthen the group.

Also, I think “[making] those blogs useful for their coursework as well” is kind of missing the point by approaching it from the wrong way. By setting blogging as coursework you’re just making it a task — I see this as a remedy for it being just work.

Liam Haynes:

This sounds like it can only be a good idea. While my blog and its aims/audience seem slightly removed from the general arena of your and other journalism students blogs, it would still be swell to be involved. Anything that kick starts or helps to maintain an exciting social media aspect in Lincoln is valuable.