The summer is just about halfway over, and I’ve been talking with a lot of folks from IU who are really excited about getting back to Bloomington and starting back at the IDS. From London to Reno to Tampa to Rochester, Ind., we have reporters in internships who are learning and growing as journalists, ready to bring their talents back to the Daily Student. We’ve got a month before fall workshops and our first week of production and our management team has a lot of plans and great ideas for when we hit the ground in August.
This is not meant to take away from the summer staff. I’m always blown away by the amazing content that our summer staff churns out with a small group of folks. They are running some amazing long-form features with stellar visuals that exemplify our quality storytelling. In the fall, we are going to build on that and continue to cultivate great stories in all lengths and varieties. Which brings me to the first thing to be excited about for August.
We will have strategically planned news and feature content that show off our very best. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the biggest strength of the Indiana Daily Student is our long-form writing. Director of Student Media Ron Johnson has called it a “narrative Renaissance” and Hoosier journalists are at the center of it. We will continue to produce the best features and enterprise stories in the country with some of the best student journalists in the nation (nay, the world). But to be a great newspaper we must go beyond 2000-word centerpieces. Our short-form and rapid-fire journalism must also be top notch. We have a quality group of editors, managers and reporters that will be able to churn out quality copy that informs readers quickly and completely. Features will run, as they always have, but they’ll be accompanied by hard news stories that matter to Bloomington and Indiana University.
We will also ensure consistent quality in design to make our stories pop off the page and into the hands of our readers. We’ll be entering in the sixth semester of “the redesign” when we get to Bloomington in August. As a whole staff, we’ve grown accustomed to it and we’ve learned a lot about ASFs, above-the-fold design and compelling packages that help our readers get the story. We’ll be continuing this and improving as always. Our art director, Matt Callahan, has a lot of brilliant ideas to help us define our style and keep our readers engaged. He’ll be working with every desk to make sure that we not only increase pickups, but draw the attention of the reader to inside pages. You’ll remember in the spring that we used four-page wraps for basketball games that were huge successes. Those will be coming back in the fall for basketball games. Those wraps, along with other above-the-fold design that we’ll work on every day, will keep our pickups high and our readers happy.
We love pickups, but we also will be re-working how we look at idsnews.com to make sure our readers are served properly online. We are in the process of a web redesign, but while the new site is in production, we can still improve the way we work on idsnews.com. I’ll have more on this at fall workshops (Aug. 11-12), but we will be instituting rolling deadlines for desks to get stories in and on the web quickly and with proper edits. Stories won’t be sitting in K4 at layout for hours anymore, content will go right up online so our readers can see our product. We’ll also be working on increasing interactivity through graphics and a strong multimedia team. We’ll be training new visual reporters with still and video cameras, so they’ll be prepared to tell stories in new and interesting ways. We’ll revitalize our social media with targeted strategy to engage our community on the Web, including live-tweeting events from both official and reporters accounts.
Online journalism will also be crucial to our political coverage, a cornerstone of our fall news planning. If you don’t already, follow the latest IDS Twitter account, @IDSPolitics. That will be a place for our strong election team to get political coverage information to you quickly and accurately. They’ll be covering the 2012 election from Charlotte, N.C. and Tampa, Fla. for the political conventions and from Bloomington on election night. We’ll also be using Cover-It-Live chats during the political conventions and on election night to keep readers informed. Of course we don’t expect to be the number-one stop for readers to get national headlines, but we can offer something that they cannot get anywhere else: local analysis and reaction from the Bloomington community on the national discussion of the day. This will be our biggest goal in every story we do next semester. We will make sure that we are producing content that is of the highest priority for our readership.
Most importantly, this and other projects will help our readers “own the news.” You’ll notice that our marketing team has a new readership campaign: “Own the News: Be a part of Hoosier Nation with the Indiana Daily Student.” They’re right. Our readers can own the news because we are producing it exclusively for them. We are creating content that our readers will care about. We’ll be bringing them important news, gripping features, thoughtful analysis and quality visuals both online and in print. The management staff has been talking about projects and we can’t wait to get started on them with you. We’ll have some big stories this fall: a national election, a highly-anticipated basketball team, the Mayan apocalypse in December. We’ll have an influx of brand new students on campus in August, alongside longtime Hoosiers ready for another year. This is our time, and I simply cannot wait to own the news with you.
Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.
-CS
Charlie Scudder 