This year will be a turning point for journalism. Reporters will no longer just pick up a microphone and report breaking news. That reporter will have to upload a video onto the station’s Web site, blog about people’s reactions and tweet about when the report will broadcast live—all within 24 hours of the breaking news.
As an experiment, we tried to give students at Florida A&M a taste of what newsrooms across the world are doing today—driving more viewers to use multimedia. During campaign week, we tweeted about the elections. Our followers increased from 600 to nearly 900 by the end of the week. There were more than 2,000 extra hits on thefamuanonline.com by Friday.
The experiment worked.
Students want the same “on-the-go” news as any other person. We did have mixed reviews.
Some people tweeted The Famuan for more details and information after we gave the results. Some called us “cheap journalists” saying we are just using social networking sites to cutback on writing stories. Others actually tweeted that whatever The Famuan updates, they will believe because it is a reliable source.
Of course people are going to favor or disfavor something that has never been done before, which is why we want to read your suggestions and comments. We will continue to twitdoc, twitvid, blog and use any other means to get information to students.
Did you know we live blog on our Web site during basketball games? We want to broadcast some events live using ustream.tv, but the university has a firewall against Web sites that stream live. Instead, there is FamCast, FAMU’s Univeristy Webcast System, where anyone can watch videos from campus events online.
Publications will continue to evolve and cater to a viewer’s preference.
From your responses, we will cutback our tweets to only three times a day along with any breaking news stories that may come our way. Follow every section’s twitter account to get the latest sports updates, movie reviews and news. Send your suggestions and comments to famuanonline@gmail.com.
We want to hear from you. This is your paper!