Monday, February 11, 2008

[Media] One Student Newspaper Takes the Plunge - And It Appears to Be Working

Found at Notes from a Teacher, something damned interesting:

A entire college student newspaper, the York Vision of the University of York, housed within a Facebook app.

Holy cow.

Link here - and I separate it out because you're required to give the app access to your Facebook information to view the paper (which is a major downside to this enterprise, for sure).

Of course, I believe you also have to be a Facebook member to view the paper, but I've not tried while logged out.

Flipping through the tabs, I see that it has a comparable amount of content to most other college dailies I've seen, though I don't know if it's a daily or not.

I do know that it's won a ton of awards, including being named the Guardian Student Newspaper of the Year for three years in a row.

I hold the Guardian in pretty high regard, so that's pretty amazing.

For those without Facebook, check out the Wikipedia page for some info on the paper.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Holy Cow! They've hit upon the secret to running a profitable Web based newspaper. Use students who are paid little or nothing.

I bet the Sulzbergers and Grahams change their entire business models after reading this.

Dennis said...

I appreciate snark as much as anyone, but that's crap and you know it. =)

No one said anything about a paid newspaper here, not even me. Don't pretend this is somehow evidence that paper journalism isn't in trouble.

And those students sound like they can out-write most of the NYT and WaPo staffs anyway. I'd take those York writers over Fred Hiatt any day.

 
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