| Fun Newspaper Style |
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| Written by Michele Martin | |
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This weekend a group of seven of our editorial board and future editorial board members went up to St. Louis for the annual Associated College Press and Collegiate Media Association conference. In years past, it has been a good thing, but this year, going to the conference has or will really improve our paper. We have come up with so many great ideas to make The Miner, and especially TheMissouriMiner.com much, much better. First and foremost, we want to continue to improve our website. We have great, great plans for this. We hope to be able to have a forum up and running in the relatively near future. This will be a forum for everyone, as we have no hopes of limiting usage to being a student. One thing that you can expect is web only content. By this, I don't mean just blogs. It means full stories or pictures that will be going solely on the website. In addition, we will be updating content on our website more than just once a week. That way, you don't have to wait for news. For the printed paper, we have ideas for redesign. More importantly in my mind are our ideas to improve content. Dan O'Connell (News Editor) has some neat ideas on redesign (primarily the front page, though I don't think it's just limited to that). Tara Harris (Entertainment Editor) got some good entertainment section content ideas. Chris Stryker (Features Editor) focused on media law and learned a lot about copyright law and libel. Nathan Harl, like a good Managing Editor, dabbled a little bit in everything. Bob Ward (Computer boy/Assistant Managing Editor) got a lot of info on websites, web legality, and went to sessions and took notes for our Advertising Director (Kristen Harris) because something came up and she was unable to attend. And Kevin Knocke (news writer)…. Well, Kevin just blew all of us out of the water with all of his ideas. Kevin also came up with one of our new hopeful entertainment features, Where's Borat? (I hope he will explain this in a future blog.) For me, going to these conferences are great because I can be around such a large group of people, all willing to talk about what they are doing with their paper and where they are hoping to go. It is this atmosphere that has aided or fostered many of our ideas. Personally, I focused a lot on professional development and media law. Something interesting we found out is that Truman University will be writing an article in the next few weeks about dating guys for Rolla. To be honest, I don't really know what to think or expect from that. Probably just a good laugh. We were also in St. Louis during the World Series. That was a cool experience. To see all the people who spent full days walking around downtown St. Louis in Cardinals shirts was actually pretty cool. It was a very neat atmosphere. Along those same lines, at the Adam's Mark hotel, where the conference was held, the Tigers ended up staying the night (due to the fact that on Wednesday night the game got rained out and the team had to stay somewhere on Thursday night because the Wednesday game was moved to Friday). This resulted in the entire 10th and part of the 9th floors to be kicked out. Our friends KMNR were on the 9th floor. Unfortunately, they got moved down to Westport Plaza. However, they did end up getting to stay for free. Another interesting tidbit of information was that our paper, sitting with dozens of other papers for people to pick up and take, was one in the first papers to run out completely. We also started off with a significantly larger stack of papers than others. I attribute this to the fact that ours looks good. Other than the papers with color front pages, ours was probably one of the best looking. It's also good because now the entire Associated College Press knows of the situation where SAFB is trying to cut our funding. (Take that SAFB). Also interesting was something Chris learned in one of his media law and copyright sessions – photos that are put on facebook do not belong to the person who put them on. Facebook (or the owning company, whose name I forget) retains copyright. I found that interesting. At any rate, this was an awesome event for us. We will grow as a paper, we will grow as a website. And even more importantly, The Missouri Miner and KMNR will together grow as a more unified media organization. |
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