iMPrint Magazine - Editor’s Blog

iMPrint Magazine: College Life’s Internet Magazine, founded in 2004 at Ithaca College, has been honored for its quality and design by two separate organizations.

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) named iMPrint Best Online College Magazine, awarding the publication first place in its annual AEJMC Magazine Division competition.

Judge Laura Bronson, editor of award-winning realsimple.com, praised iMPrint for its features, design and functionality.

“While many of the entries in the Online Magazine category mix together words, images, video, audio to take advantage of the Web’s capabilities, iMPrint Magazine from Ithaca College uses the medium most effectively,” Bronson said. “That it was created as an online magazine and isn’t a print magazine that’s simply been repurposed for the web is evident in the site’s architecture and functionality.”

• 2006 AEJMC Magazine Competiton winners
• 2006 AEJMC Magazine Division judges’ comments

The magazine topped last year’s winner, The Devil’s Tale based out of Arizona State University, which took second place.

iMPrint Magazine was also named a winner in the International Student Media Festival (ISMF), sponsored by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. The yearly competition recognizes and celebrates outstanding student media.

Both awards are testament to the hard work and dedication of the magazine’s staff of editors and writers, who give many hours each month to produce the web’s best online college magazine, as well as the magazine’s adviser, Kim Gregson, of Ithaca College’s Television and Radio Department.

A new publishing year for iMPrint begins in September, featuring additions such as user-created photos and new stories told through multiple mediums.

Ok, so call me biased, but I’m interning this summer at the Allentown Morning Call and they are on top of the 24-hour news online.

Their Web site, mcall.com, looks a lot like the Sacramento Bee Web site (found at sacbee.com) that I blogged about in an earlier post. Boasting 20 million visitors every month, mcall.com has become a useful and timely homepage for people of the Lehigh Valley.

With three people stationed near the city desk in the Allentown office, the scanner is monitored and developing stories are tracked and updated online. Even as reporters are getting the details, information is going up the Web. In addition, the paper has staffers that record news briefings for local radio stations, which appear in the form of podcasts on their Web site.

For a small paper, owned by Tribune Company, they’re doing some great things online. As the company continues to struggle financially, at least they are recognizing that the future lies in online success.

The San Diego Union-Tribune Web site, signonsandiego.com, currently features an interactive, community-based photography blog that has users claiming some personal ownership over the site.

Moblogs, or mobile weblogs, are categorized photo galleries of people, places and things, in this case from around the San Diego area, submitted by users either via cell phone or e-mail. News Web sites are becoming more and more flexible when it comes to user customization (see the new Sacramento Bee Web site, sacbee.com) and that means giving users a bigger stake in the content they can contribute and interact with.

Beyond written contributions (forums, feedback, etc.), it would appear that user-created, user-submitted photography and video are some of the most popular features of current successful Web sites. Take, for example, the hugely popular Google Video. Not to mention thriving Web sites such as myspace.com, facebook.com, livejournal.com, xanga.com and countless other blog Web sites, which combined allow users to share every type of media.

Two things are becoming clear: people like to share their personal stories and experiences, and other people like to hear about them. So, to begin to allow users to be able to do just that, iMPrint is developing its own version of Moblogs to be introduced in Fall 2006. We are also considering other avenues, such as user-created iMPrint blogs, to allow college students from across the country to share their stories and experiences. Stay tuned.

PRESSTIME magazine recently honored The Arizona Republic for an innovative combination of available computer and Internet technologies.

The publication, found online at azcentral.com, uses text-to-speech technology to convert recently posted articles into audio format. The files are then available as podcasts (downloads to a Macintosh iPod) for listeners on the go.

It seems clear that newspapers, and publications in general, have begun to take advantage of what the Internet has to offer, whether it’s unlimited space, multimedia, interactivity, etc.; however, no organization has yet to seamlessly integrate available technologies to produce a truly for-Web publication.

The Arizona Republic deserves recognition for its willingness to think outside of the box and be willing to combine available technology to enhance the user’s experience and tell stories in multiple formats.

See a short article on this new practice on CyberJournalist.Net.

In response to some aggressive spamming campaigns, iMPrint has been forced to review comments before they appear on the Web site. While the best way to encourage dialogue is to provide an open and un-moderated forum, there are aspects of Web site maintenance that make that perfect scenario impossible.

iMPrint does not make a practice of editing comments. Unless a comment falls under one of our deletion categories (poor language, personal attacks, irrelevant topics and/or self-promotion) it will be automatically accepted. Comments are not edited for spelling or grammar.

While this practice will slightly delay the conversation on iMPrint, it will prevent spammers from clogging the message boards with advertising.

The ‘feedback’ option on journalism Web sites has been a hot topic of debate recently, especially among newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, where people tend to use the comment feature to express feelings and opinions often not connected with the actual article topic.

If you have an opinion or idea about comment moderation, I encourage you to join the conversation.