CHRIS SEGAL
Director of Strategic Planning
I have seen you do it, your friends watch you do it and professors are obviously aware of it. The “it” is reading the online Graphic while you should be taking notes or paying attention in class.
If you keep reading this column here in print, or online, you may even get a free lunch out of the deal.
Our online numbers have shown that high traffic times, which are between 7:30 and 9 a.m. and 5:30 and 7:30 p.m., coincide with typical class times. Certainly paying attention in class is important but reading the Graphic is necessary as well. The Graphic is one of the few places to go to read about the entire Pepperdine community.
Our coverage of the community in which we live, work and learn, also coincide with an interesting and innovative time in the newspaper industry.
Many people have predicted the downfall of newspapers. Ted Turner said more than a quarter of a century ago that newspapers would be dead in 10 years. Obviously he was wrong, but the industry is changing and so are we at the Graphic.
Our initiatives for this year are to engage readers and viewers with interactive content and serve as a news portal for the Pepperdine community. We will be doing this by working closely with all student media. The Online Graphic will be a portal for everything Pepperdine, meaning it will be a place to read and interact with campus news.
We are in the process of finding a way to host news packages from NewsWaves so that students who have class and miss the program can get their content on demand at the Online Graphic. In addition, we will be creating our own content for the Web site. This will give us the ability to tell stories in a new way to engage readers with visual and audio content that has never been available to newspapers before the age of the Internet.
Another new feature will be blogs —something that we have steered clear of while other college newspaper have been playing around with them for a few years. After studying different techniques and challenges associated with blogging, we have decided to focus on providing you, our readers, with a glimpse into our decision making process through our blog posts.
Through blogging, we will add a new layer of transparency. Already, Shannon Kelly, editor in chief of the Graphic, has blogged about a meeting that took place between the Graphic staff members and a number of Pepperdine administrators, including President Andrew K. Benton and Provost Darryl Tippens.
We will also be engaging readers through our blogs. Student, faculty and staff will be able to comment on our posts. Check back frequently with our blogs as we will be updating them frequently with short posts about things that we believe are pertinent to the community.
My first order of blogging for the new year is to engage all Graphic readers to visit our blogs. The first member of the Pepperdine community, excluding students working for Student Publications, to post a comment on my blog (newsbuf.blogspot.com) will be treated to lunch at Marmalade. The downside is that you will have to eat lunch with me, and get your picture taken with me, so I can post it on the blog as proof.
We will also be engaging the Pepperdine community to encourage them to become contributors to the news. We will be encouraging students, faculty and staff members to send us their camera phone photos of events like Frosh Follies and formals. Many contributed photos should make it onto the Web site and a few might even make it into the Graphic.
There is a great staff in place to enact these initiatives, and we are excited to venture into new territory.
And, remember to take us to task if there is anything you think we can do better to serve you and the rest of the Pepperdine community.
08-27-2007