Tuesday, December 30, 2008

College Radio Stations Must Comply with FCC Rules

A post from Warren Kozireski, General Manager of WBSU 89.1 FM at SUNY College at Brockport, to the Collegiate Broadcasters, Inc. listerv, mentions the following article:

Utica College's WPNR Paying $10K to Settle FCC Violations

"Students at Utica College’s WPNR are learning a lesson they’ll probably never forget: the importance of maintaining a complete and up-to-date Public File for the FCC."

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Three ideas about online media and journalism

I just had an excellent discussion with Tyler Dukes about online media and journalism. Here are a few significant points that we discussed:

  • The most important value that can be added to online publishing is credibility. This especially applies in social networking. Whether or not people follow your website, blog or tweets depends how much they trust you. If you are publishing junk people will pay not attention. So how do we improve our online credibility? One way is to understand our readers. What is relevant to the students, faculty and staff? The web, more than any other medium, provides a way to interact with our audience so we know what is important to them.

  • Journalists need to be as tech-savvy as their audience. You will be a better journalist if you are familiar with web/technology trends (and listen to your IT guy's ramblings :p ). Where is our audience going online? We as journalists can't be expected to create social networking sites or online communities, but we need to be aware of where our users are already going online. They are on Facebook, Twitter, iPhones and who knows what else in the future. Go there to deliver news and solicit their input. This also implies that our systems of delivering news must as technologically open as possible. It must be possible to pull content from our site, blogs, etc. to be re-published elsewhere. The places where people are going online changes constantly, and we can't meet this moving benchmark without keeping our systems open.

  • There is still no concrete way to monetize online news. At this point, anyone can create content with practically no cost. The media is competing with it's audience and has no control over the technology used to deliver or receive news. Readers are empowered and can receive information piece-by-piece based on their personal interests and contacts. The definition of "mass media" is evolving. It remains to be seen what business model arises from this evolution, but Tyler and I toyed with the idea that the value of news is in its readers. The profiles and personal habits of your readers provides a way to target ads very specifically. The more information you provide in your personal profiles, the more information collected about your browsing and shopping habits, the more valuable you are, and the more coupons you could receive according to your interests (think MVP card at Food Lion). Sound scary? Yes, but it will be much less scary, perhaps natural, to our children and grandchildren.