Archive for the 'Blogging' Category
I was reading some of the comments regarding our Editors’ Note about no longer mentioning the killer on the site and want to clarify some things.
First and foremost, we appreciate all of your feedback and encourage it regardless of your stance on any topic we write about.
Second, our decision does not mean that newsworthy information concerning this situation will not get coverage. We just don’t believe that kowtowing to a killer by reprinting his rants and publishing his photos does much for our readership besides pour salt into the wound. We are Planet Blacksburg. We are Hokies. Our responsibility is to our community. If you want to see the contents of the NBC package, do so. You will just have to look elsewhere.
Third, please don’t forget that we are a 100% volunteer STUDENT organization. 33 lives were lost on Monday. We lost friends in the violence. We lost professors. One of our writers lost a roommate. This is not easy for any of us. Putting our already depleted resources and energy into covering the killer is unhealthy for us physically and emotionally. Leave the investigating to the authorities; leave the personality profiling to the psychologists. If they turn up something interesting, we’ll let you know.
Also, there is plenty of newsworthy activity in our town that we need to get back to covering. The biggest complaint about media is how they overdo it and never report enough good news. Hopefully, we can change that. “Invent the Future”
- Neal Turnage
Imagine yourself in a 25-person computer lab on the upper quad of Virginia Tech’s campus on the first day of classes. Your professor walks in, and blasts,
You are all reporters for the Blacksburg Planet and your first story is due at 5:00 p.m. 19 cats are dead…
You had to construct your lead perfectly, and make triple-sure that your story had no factual errors or you would recieve a 60% on that paper. This was the reality of Roland Lazenby’s media writing class.
One day after one of his lectures, I decided that the Internet was a perfect medium for student journalism opportunities. .
The Collegiate Times was a perfectly good newspaper at the time, but it was difficult to get published. Lazenby’s students were writing real news articles, and they weren’t making it past his briefcase. It is basically free to use the web as a publishing medium, so I thought that people might want to read these stories.
Professor Lazenby liked the idea, and we ran with it. We asked the university to let us use the alias planet.org.vt.edu. The only requirements for a student organization at Virginia Tech are a student and an advisor, so in the Fall of 2005, Planet Blacksburg was born.
The site looks unprofessional and the layout was atrocious, but the possibilities were endless. We could use this evolving, interactive portal to publish assignments, and let the whole world explore our attempt at accurate news gathering.
We recruited students, and we published their work. For one long semester, Lazenby edited, and I tried to find time to organize our stories somewhere on the website. There were a few AP style errors, but Google was indexing our content, and traffic was rising. Those few months wore us both out, but it was well worth it.
One of the greatest milestones for Planet Blacksburg was the adaptation of video. Nikki Eley published some of the best video content from the very start. Now we have videos that make it on the Sports Illustrated Blog:
Today, we have over 800 articles published, and more rich media than any other local news organization besides the Roanoke Times. Neal Turnage has put countless hours in to really define our sports section. Over the past two years, over 100 students have been a part of our group, and we hope to attract more attention on May 3rd, when we will co-host a concert at the new Awful Arthurs in Kent Square with BigLickU.
The best part of Planet Blacksburg is the student participation. Anyone can build a student media operation from the ground up with the right information, and a little motivation. Getting students published was my goal from the beginning, and I believe that is still the aim of PB. Kevin Cupp has taken over as webmaster, and I am confident that he can carry our mission forward with exciting innovative features, and the ability to syndicate our stories easier.
Everyone else has made a huge impact, and we will continue to grow with more and more students getting involved all the time. Please let us know what you think of our site, and don’t hesitate to contact us with suggestions, comments, and any general feedback. Planet Blacksburg is for you.
Welcome to the Planet Blacksburg Development Blog.
I will write the real Hello World post later tonight.
This blog is about how to start a college media organization from the ground up. PB’s original ability was taking real journalism assignments and turning them into published work. We will explain how we did it in the blog.
More to come later…
