Bringing the Daily Tar Heel into the Digital Age

The theory: Netizens want a more interactive experience in an online article versus a print article.

The problem: Dailytarheel.com articles offer nothing new compared to the print version of the DTH

The solution: Take steps to make the site’s online experience more interactive.

The purpose of a newspaper website, the online arm of a print publication, is to provide information and services that the print version cannot. Using the nearly infinite network of the Web to give readers a larger and more varied amount of information in a more timely way creates a completely different experience for the website versus the passive nature of a print newspaper. Not that they each have their place; most major newspapers such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have adjusted to a two-way model of disseminating then news online and in print.

The Daily Tar Heel fails in this miserably. What one finds on the website is almost precisely what is found in the print version of the DTH. The articles from the print version are simply reprinted on DTH.com, in dearth of multimedia and access to extra information. The website is an untapped opportunity to give UNC students a much more exciting dissemination of news. Here is how they should reform their website for the digital age:
All columnists should have their own blogs. Most columnists at the DTH only write articles once or twice a week, and opinion articles can be even more sparse. If all DTH columnists had their own blogs, their thoughts would not be limited to their weekly column; they a free to write on a much more regular basis as well as present much more information to readers, making this means of communication much more personal. This also means less censorship of what columnists say, which is good for freedom of speech, but bad if avoiding lawsuits is concerned.

Integrating multimedia into print stories. All of the articles seen on the DTH website are essentially copied and pasted from the print version. The articles should contain much more, including

• photoblogs and photostories
• video coverage of stories
• podcasts
• links and access to related articles across the web
  

Web-only columnists. In addition to giving the print stories a new dimension on the web, the DTH should have several columnists who exclusively write web content. Having web-only columnists would allow the site to have much more original content updated more frequently than copying and pasting print stories.

Participatory activites. Having experienced the front lines, many students pick up the Daily Tar Heel for the main purpose of playing sudoku or word puzzles, perhaps because these puzzles are the only participatory section of the print newspaper. The online DTH should then bring more reader participation. It could be flash cartoons, mp3 downloads of local artists, even allowing non-DTH student to contribute as guests with multimedia-based stories (such as a photo essay).

With such a diverse medium at their fingertips, the DTH need not be so one-dimensional. Hopefully they’l listen and change their site to use the Web to the best of their advantage.

JOMC 711 In Review

Taking this course has been quite an enlightening experience for me. I have had a lot of fun interacting with my fellow students as well as writing for this blog, and I feel that I will be able to apply much of what I learned into real life. I want to thank all of the students and my professor BC for making this great experience possible.

How my writing has changed and what I’ve learned that is most useful:

• Writing for an audience. When writing any piece it’s vital to have a specific audience in ind to write for. Before this class I was already conscious about writing for an audience, but often I would write for a very specific audience: the person who was going to critique my work, usually someone in academia. It would sometimes be difficult for me to escape that mindset when trying to write for a wider audience (in my case, Tar Heel fans like me). This class has forced me to break from that line of thinking, and fundamentally it has made my writing much better and less cumbersome. I am now much more comfortable when writing for an audience, and I think that my work has improved dramatically as a result.

• Writing in a web-friendly format. I was a novice at writing for the Web, also because I was accustomed to writing for academic print. Therefore a lot of my early blog work would compose of long, visually straining paragraphs. Over the course of the semester I have become very conscious of writing to better suit the format by using smaller easy-to-read paragraphs, bullet lists like this one and simpler language to say more in less space.
• Semiotics: The design of the webpage greatly impacts the reaction netizens have to your site, and it’s important to design the page in a user-friendly manner while paying attention to audience. For example, I began this website with a design which I thought looked cool, but ultimately made it difficult to navigate the page and eye-straining to read the articles, so I ultimately settled on this efficient, no-nonsense design. You never get a second chance at a first impression.
• Integrating multimedia. The Web may be text-based, but it has so much more to offer, and thus netizens demand more than just text from online articles. I now try  to integrate multimedia into my articles whenever possible, including photos, videos, flash animation, and links to relevant outside information.

A few unanswered questions:

• How does a blogger more efficiently advertise and/or drive traffic to their blog?  How do you get search engines to find you first without writing solely for keywords or altering the subject of content with the intent of attracting search engines?
• What are some effective strategies in using viral video as a means of advertising for your site/business? Viral advertising brings a lot of attention to a business. How do you use it to get the attention of the right netizens?

What could be changed about the course:

• Blackboard Discussion Boards. The discussion boards of this course was the digital equivalent of attending class, and I gained a lot of information from the boards. However the lack of organization made me have to sift through many postings that was of little relevance to the main discussion. There has to be a way to efficiently find more pertinent posts.
• PDF Articles. Some of the PDF articles for this semester were either badly scanned or photocopied. This made them very difficult to read on top of the fact that some of them discussed concept that did not seem to have real life applications.
• Study Book. The Study book offered a good general view of the course and was a good reference for details on assignments, but I did not use it as much as I thought I would. Perhaps it should include a deeper discussion of concepts that might not be discussed in as much detail on Blackboard.

I had so much fun this semester writing about Tar Heel Athletics that I created a new blog mostly dedicated to the Heels, Tar Heel Mania, which I hope my classmates will visit regularly. More than anything else, this semester has laid the ground rules of writing online so that I can simply set my mind free when I write, and the result is a much better product.