“I believe in holding out my hand to other women BEFORE it’s asked for, and keeping it out past the point it is self-effacingly rejected, or bitchily refused. I know that for most women, the only thing harder than asking for help is staying around to offer it after it’s been rebuffed.”

–Terri Senft, Ten Statements from a ‘New Woman’ in the Tech Sector

Eight new items in the current Monday Map update, which was delayed a day because of the MLK holiday. Four new states — Tennessee, New Mexico, Utah, and North Carolina — have been added to the map this week, bringing the total for the academic year to twenty-seven.

January 17: Weeks after local high school students staged a protest at Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s offices, the city’s Public Library Board announced that a new public library would be established in the Altgeld Gardens public housing complex. Altgeld had been without a library since a pipe burst in the old facility nearly a year ago.

January 15: The state student association serving North Carolina’s seventeen public colleges and universities has launched a petition drive aimed at stopping a planned $200 statewide tuition hike.

January 14: A dozen students at the university of New Mexico took a petition bearing more then 400 names to the offices of the UNM president. The students were asking that a ban on smoking near UNM’s dorms be delayed for two years.

January 14: Students from a high school located at Bronx Community College marched across the BCC campus to protest the planned relocation of their school. BCC, which has seen a dramatic increase in enrollment since the 2008 economic crisis, says it no longer has room for the high school.

January 13: Students at the University of Tennessee staged a protest that threatened to erupt into riot after football coach Lane Kiffin announced his resignation. Kiffin had been in his position for just fourteen months.

January 13: Fifty students at Georgia’s Albany State University demonstrated outside university president Everette Freeman’s office, calling for his resignation after the forced resignation of a popular student affairs administrator.

January 12: Students protested at a Hamden, Connecticut school board meeting, calling for the reinstatement of teacher Bai Haiyan. Haiyan, a Chinese national, faces deportation as a result of her dismissal.

January 12: The student government of Utah State University announced plans to launch a classroom campaign against budget cuts planned for the 2010-11 academic year.

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.