Campuses
Chari Sutherland
9/9/09
Editor: Miriam Camp
At the Red and Black offices the editors lament the leftover papers at the end of each day. The print edition is not getting into enough hands.
At The Daily Gamecock, the student newspaper of University of South Carolina (USC), the situation is different.
“We can’t keep the print version on the shelves at beginning of the semester. Our online versions get most hits. “By midterms, we find that readership does begin to decline slightly due to level of student schoolwork,” said Scott Lindenburg is Director of Student Media at the University of South Carolina.
USC’s Daily Gamecock experienced growth in 2006, Lindenburg said. “We went from a three-day a week paper to a 5-day.” He said there were spots on or near campus that are found to be hotter or colder depending on stories and time of year. They also do readership surveys to find out what readers want to see in the paper. Always knowing what the readers want is the key, Lindenburg said. “Also there are things in the print version that we find readers are drawn to—such as Sudoku puzzles, original cartoonists and features that don’t appear in the online version.”
“Writing has gotten shorter. We are more image-heavy to draw people in.” Online product has helped point the print version to what the print reader wants.
Social media such as Twitter and blogging has helped the online version more so than the print version. “Social media helps the branding overall. The Gamecock Twitters regularly from certain sections, such as Twitter updates on a game or breaking news.
Lindenburg teaches a class at USC on media consumption. “I find that students overall are using print and online media of our college paper more than even broadcast sources.”
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Cheri and I discussed her story and the need to finish her story with the original three sources, plus one additional source. We agreed that her fourth source should be the faculty sponsor for the Red and Black. Her writing is great, but the article was not finished by deadline. She had trouble getting through to her sources, but she does have all of her sources now.
ReplyDeleteShe told me that she is a slow writer and likes to revise her work many times before turning it in. Like me she is an anxious writer. She tends to use 50-60% of her notes when writing her story. We discussed several grammatical errors in her story that she is going to correct before Wednesday. There was one quote that I had to read a few times to understand, so she might take it out.