Author Archive

Earlier this week I talked a bit about the role that student newspapers play in this blog, and about the inadvertent barriers they often put up to building a readership beyond their home campus — the ways in which they make miss opportunities for bloggers to write about them and link to their stuff. Today I’m going to offer five tips for student papers that are looking to raise their online profile, and expand their national readership, without a lot of ongoing effort.

1 | Identify yourself.

It’s startling how often student newspapers’ websites fail to identify the school they serve. If I’ve reached an article on your site through a Google search, I don’t necessarily know what campus I’m reading about, and that’s data I need to have if I’m going to write about your piece. So tell me. In the header, in the footer, somewhere. Preferably somewhere that’s visible from every page of your site. And if the name of your school doesn’t include the name of the state it’s in, tell me that too. (Putting your newspaper’s full name and mailing address in the footer of every page, like the Ball State Daily News does, is a clean and concise way of handling this.)

2 | Really identify yourself.

Having the name and location of your institution at my fingertips is a big help if I’m writing something up on the fly, or Tweeting a link from the road. But if I’m doing a bigger piece, I’m going to want more information. Give me an “About Us” page with basic facts about your paper (is it a daily? a weekly? is it independent, or official? how long has it been around? how can I reach you?) and your school (public? private? how big? what kind of an institution?), and I’m a happy blogger.

3 | Get me up to speed.

I know that student papers traditionally assume a certain familiarity with the campus, as they should. I wouldn’t want you to spend the first half of your story spoon-feeding me information that every one of your regular readers already possesses. But a lot of the time when I’m reading, I get the strong impression that there’s background being assumed that many local students lack. If I’m completely lost, it’s likely that some of your readers in the dining halls are also confused — if you give them what they need, I’ll probably have most of what I need too.

4 | Link me up.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a student newspaper use links effectively to orient their readers in their ongoing coverage of a story, and it’s a shame — particularly since many student papers have clunky internal search engines. If you’re hitting a story hard, particularly a story that’s getting some buzz beyond the campus, link to your previous stories in every new piece you write.

5 | Tweet me.

I follow more than seven hundred Twitter feeds, but only a handful of student newspapers. There are a lot of great student media Twitter feeds out there, but most of them are way too high-volume and broad-focus for someone like me to keep up with. That’s as it should be, of course — a student paper’s Twitter feed should be pitched to the students of that campus — but the thoughtful use of hashtags, Twitter lists, and dedicated accounts can turn a student paper into a must-read online source on a breaking story.

There you go — my top five suggestions for student newspapers looking to build their profile among bloggers like me and readers like mine. If you’ve got other ideas, post them in comments.

I spend a lot of the time reading student newspapers. My standing Google searches for phrases like “students protested” or “student government” often lead me to them, and I rely on aggregators like the National Student News Service — who themselves rely on student papers — to help me find stuff I don’t discover on my own. When I track down a story through non-student media or via a tip, I always make sure to check out what the relevant student paper has to say on the subject.

I spend a lot of time reading student newspapers, and I’m far from alone. There are hundreds of bloggers on dozens of beats out there scavenging for stories like I do, and for many of them the campus press is invaluable.

So why do so many student newspapers act like their only readers are in the dorms and the dining halls?

When I come across an important student newspaper story, even a piece that serves me up a clear narrative and a bunch of juicy quotes, I’m usually a long way away from being able to adapt that story to my blog. I can expect to have to go through a huge slog of research to figure out what the “SLAC” mentioned in the fourth paragraph is, whether the academic vice president quoted in the sixth is a student or a university officer, and even — and I’m not kidding here — what state the university I want to write about is in.

Now, I recognize that the core audience for a campus paper is its campus. I get that that’s the readership you’re most concerned with serving. I understand that a lot of your ads are local ads, and that me giving you a national audience isn’t necessarily going to win you a bunch of new click-throughs. But I also know that writers like to be read, that editors like their stories to break big, and that if the work you’re doing is important work a broader audience means a greater impact.

And I also know that a story that’s easy for me to write is one I’m more likely to write. I know that I’m more likely to invest my energy in a piece if I’ll be able to put it together quickly from one or two self-contained sources. And I know that there are a lot of bloggers out there who are a lot like me.

Tomorrow: Five simple things student newspaper editors can do to get us bloggers linking to, and writing about, their best work.

I’m still digging around for new material from last semester to add to the site’s Google Map, but I promised Monday updates starting today, and so Monday updates will in fact start today.

I’ve plugged in seven new stories to the map in the last week, including three from states — Oregon, Idaho, and Virginia — that were previously unrepresented. Here’s the map, with the new stories posted below:

January 5 | Students across Oregon ended a voter-registration drive and began an organizing campaign around two state tax referenda that could mean millions of dollars in new funding for higher education.

January 4 | California’s first student protest of 2010 was took place at noon at UC Irvine, marking Irvine’s first day of classes of the Winter Quarter.

January 1 | Four Florida students, including the student government president at the InterAmerican campus of Miami-Dade College, began a 1500-mile march to Washington DC to raise support for immigration reform and the DREAM Act.

December 22 | New York City’s Yeshiva University, one of America’s oldest and respected Jewish colleges, held a forum on homosexuality and Orthodox Judaism. The forum, which was attended by hundreds, was prompted by a closeted gay student’s anonymous column in the student newspaper.

December 17 | The Wisconsin attorney general delivered an informal opinion declaring that student government bodies at the state’s public colleges and universities are subject to open-meeting and public-records laws if they exercise governance powers.

December 11 | Hundreds of students at Idaho’s Boise State University held a rally against racism, joining hands in a human chain that stretched across BSU, after bigoted flyers were circulated on campus.

December 6 | Students in Williamsburg, Virginia staged a protest against the city’s enforcement of an anti-student zoning rule that barred more than two unrelated people from living together. Days later, the city council passed a new ordinance significantly weakening the rule.

In his State of the State address yesterday, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger endorsed a constitutional amendment that would dramatically raise state funding for public higher education and impose a restrictive cap on state prison spending.

The proposal, which would bring the University of California and the California State University system billions of dollars in guaranteed new funds each year, has left observers of California politics scrambling to grasp its implications and assess its chances of passage.

Yesterday afternoon the governor’s office released a detailed draft proposal for the amendment. Here are some of its key points:

• Beginning in the 2011-12 budget year, all reductions in state prison spending would be set aside for support of higher education.
• Starting in 2014-15, prison spending would be capped at 7% of the state budget, and higher education spending would receive a guaranteed minimum of 10%.
• All of that funding would go to the UC and CSU systems — the state’s community colleges already have a separate constitutional budget set-aside in place.
• The state government is “prohibited from … utilizing early release of prisoners” to meet the savings mandates, which the proposal anticipates the use of prison privatization to achieve.
• The provisions of the amendment could be suspended if the governor declared a state of emergency in California as provided by state law, or by a two-thirds vote of the state legislature.

As I noted yesterday, the governor’s chief of staff has cited last semester’s massive wave of student protest as the “tipping point” that led Schwarzenegger to embrace this new model of higher education funding. Whatever the ultimate prospects of this constitutional amendment, the political contours of California students’ fight for higher education have been dramatically altered by yesterday’s events.

In his final State of the State address this morning, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said the state “can no longer afford to cut higher education,” and proposed a constitutional amendment ensuring that more state funding will go to universities than to prisons.

Currently, eleven percent of California’s state spending goes to its prison system, while only seven and a half percent goes to public colleges and universities. Schwarzenegger pledged to send the state legislature “a constitutional amendment so that never again do we spend a greater percentage of our money on prisons than on higher education.”

Schwarzenegger didn’t specify what form that amendment would take, but according to a report in the Sacramento Bee, it would set spending on public higher ed at a minimum of ten percent of the state budget, and funding for prisons at a maximum of seven percent.

More to come…

Update | As @spamfriedrice notes on Twitter, Schwarzenegger is looking to cut prison funding through privatization, not reducing the prison population. Lots of angles to this story, and I’ll have much more to say soon.

Second Update | The New York Times quotes Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff as calling last semester’s student protests “the tipping point” that led the governor to head off what the Times calls a looming “dismantling of the most famous public university system in the nation.”

The political ground in California just shifted dramatically, and students shifted it.

Thursday Update | There’s a lot that remains to be unpacked about Schwarzenegger’s new position on prisons vs education. Whether a lame-duck governor has any chance of pushing this kind of a constitutional amendment through is an obvious question, as is the exact nature of his prison proposal. But one thing is clear.

California’s spending on UC and Cal State currently stands at 7.5% of the state budget. Schwarzenegger has now said that he opposes any further cuts to that funding, and that he’ll fight for a constitutional amendment that would raise it to 10%. That would be a one-third increase — a bump of 33% — and it would, as Schwarzenegger noted yesterday, restore the state’s public higher ed funding to levels last seen thirty years ago.

The Republican governor of the largest state in the union — the home of the country’s most prestigious university system — has said that it’s time to make public higher education public again.

Second Thursday Update | I’ve taken a look at the details of the Schwarzenegger proposal in a new post.