September 2011
The Intercollegiate Online News Network over the past few months has experienced phenomenal growth, expansion of programs, major technological achievements and a brightening horizon of new opportunities.
Here are some of the highlights:
- JeffersonNet. In October 2010, we achieved a founding goal of the organization: Setting up a system that could create and support news websites for any school, course, program or campus entity that want them. The system is the WordPress-based JeffersonNet.
- Growth in membership. The number of news website that are members of ICONN — and its high school subsidiary, the Interscholastic Online News Network — continues to increase.
- Educational outreach. The Going Online workshops held at the University of Tennessee over the past two years morphed into something new this past summer — online workshops. Their success has opened up new possibilities for teacher training at both the collegiate and scholastic level.
- Conferences. In addition to the workshops noted above, ICONN held its third annual conference in March. The conference was hosted by the University of Georgia Grady School of Journalism.
- ICONN/ISONN NewsStreams. The idea of using the work of individual member sites as the basis for a collegiate news wire formed and has been put into practice this year. And we have done the same thing on the scholastic side with our ISONN NewsStream.
- Strengthening the organization. We have taken a number of steps to strengthen the internal organization, including application for 501-c-3 non-profit status and the submission of several grant proposals.
JeffersonNet
By far the most significant event in ICONN’s brief history was the construction and implementation of JeffersonNet, the WordPress-based content management system that allows ICONN to build and host a news website for any high school teacher or collegiate faculty member or program that wants one. Because of its WordPress genesis, the technical system is free, and we have managed to keep the cost of hosting to a manageable level during the first year of its operation.
JeffersonNet debuted in October 2010 during the Going Online workshop we held at the University of Tennessee. It began by hosting two collegiate sites (California Dominican University and Western Carolina University) and six high school sites.
JeffersonNet is the creation of Jeff Stovall, currently a project leader for SeabourneInc., in Washington, D.C.
The JeffersonNet system currently offers limited options in terms of WordPress themes and plug-ins. This is a deliberate strategic move on ICONN’s part. When we began the network, we knew that we had limited resources to support the members of the network. Consequently, we did not want to offer any options to members that we had not thoroughly tested. We hope to expand those options in the near future, but that’s where we are at the moment.
Given that, however, we still want to hear from our member sites about what options they need to produce the journalism they would like. We believe that all the basics are there now, but we need their ideas.
Growth and members
Membership in both ICONN and ISONN has grown steadily during the past months.
As of this writing, more than 30 campus news websites are members of ICONN. These include sites that are produced by specific courses, sites that are run by and for journalism/mass communication programs, and sites affiliated with the campus newspaper. There are 18 sites that are supported by JeffersonNet.
ICONN has no criteria dictating the purpose of the news website or how active it is. These are local decisions that should be left to those involved with the sites. We encourage sites to be as active as possible in posting new material and in covering and updating news on campus.
On the ISONN site, we have grown from six members in October 2010 to 46 member sites as of the first week in September 2011. Some 42 of those sites are in the JeffersonNet system, and four sites operate independently.
Both ICONN and ISONN have a healthy and growing geographic spread. We have sites from California to Maryland and are continuing to expand our geographic reach.
Obviously, for both ICONN and ISONN the opportunities for growth in numbers continue to be huge. At the collegiate level, there are no other organizations that we know of that offer our services and share our vision of a nationwide (and beyond) collegiate news network with an educational purpose. On the scholastic side, the numbers potential is huge. A couple of organizations offer schools the opportunity of putting their publications online, but neither seems to have the vision or the scope of ISONN.
Our main job in the near future is to continue to find ways to offer our services and describe the vision of this organization to others. If we do that, the growth in numbers will undoubtedly continue.
Educational outreach
Improving education in online journalism is at the center of ICONN.
This can happen not only with changing courses and curricula but also by providing opportunities for students to practice, experiment, fail and eventually succeed. ICONN wants to give students and faculty those opportunities.
For the second year, we conducted Going Online workshops — one-day workshops on the University of Tennessee — campus directed toward introducing high school teachers (an a few college instructors) to the basic concepts of online journalism and to some of the operations of a campus news website. We made related presentations to the executive board of the North Carolina Scholastic Media Association and the fall session of the Tennessee Scholastic Press Association in November 2010 and to the summer workshop of the North Carolina Scholastic Media Association in June.
This past summer, we took the concepts and the content of that workshop online and conducted two online workshops, which together drew nearly 30 participants from California to North Carolina to Michigan to Florida, and many points in between.
The workshops themselves consisted of a series of daily “lessons” — communicated through email and backed up with a web page — a discussion board, and a set of online conferences using the WebEx online conferencing service. All of these drew praise from the participants and a vow that they would return if we were to offer more. They also resulted in a large number of new websites being added to the network.
The success of these online workshops has led us to the idea of offering some shorter, more specialized workshops online during the academic year. At the moment, we are in the process of scheduling three- or four-day workshops on
- Managing a news website
- Teaching feature writing
- Teaching sports writing
- Introducing photojournalism basics
We expect these workshops to expand both our membership and visibility.
To support all of these educational efforts and to serve as a resource for teachers, we have developed JN-21.com, a separate website that contains a great deal of teaching material and the pages for the workshop material. Anna Hall devoted a great deal of time this past spring to getting content loaded on this site.
Conferences
The third annual ICONN conference took place in Athens, Ga., in March 2011. The host and program chair was Prof. Mark Johnson, who did a superb job in putting the conference together and making all of the attendees comfortable. Some of the sessions drew as many as 50 students and faculty, and there were more than a dozen campuses — including some in California, Mississippi, North Carolina and New York — represented. (The 2009 and 2010 conferences were held in Knoxville, Tenn.)
The 2012 conference will be March 29-30 in Nashville at the First Amendment Center on the campus of Vanderbilt University.
This venue is an excellent one for ICONN because it will increase our profile, and it begins what we hope will be a long-term relationship with the First Amendment Center.
ICONN/ISONN NewsStreams
One of the most exciting initiatives that we have undertaken in the last few months is the idea of a NewsStream for both ICONN and ISONN. (We have set up separate sites for each stream. See the ICONNNewsStream.com and the ISONNNewsStream.com.)
Each member site of ICONN and ISONN agrees, on joining the network, to share its originally produce content with other members of the network (as long as they give appropriate credit to the originator, of course). The NewsStream operationalizes this agreement. This fall, we are beginning with a set of editors at the University of Tennessee and the University of Georgia. Together, they will look at all the member sites in the network on a regular basis and select content that is of more than local interest.
Once a story is selected, an editor will edit and enhance that story according to guidelines that we are currently developing. When the story is ready, we will make it available to all of the sites in the network.
This system has two immediate benefits:
- It provides a regular stream of fresh content to all of the sites.
- It gives a student working for a network site the opportunity of having his or her work appear on sites around the network.
We are looking forward to putting the NewsStreams into operation and trying out a number of ideas that we have for it. One such idea for NewsStream editors to generate original content to distribute to member. Another is to provide breaking news to member websites on major stories of interest to the scholastic and collegiate audiences.
We also intend to develop a technical system for the NewsStream so that it does not have to be a copy and paste operation.
Strengthening the organization
We have undertaken a number of steps to strengthen and assure the long-term health of ICONN.
Non-profit status. ICONN began the long process toward gaining full recognition as a non-profit organization last year. We are currently recognized by the state of Tennessee as a charitable organization, but there are months ahead before we obtain federal recognition. As part of the process, we have developed articles of incorporation, bylaws, and a formal board of directors. Fortunately, ICONN has a friend. Alan Hall, a long-time newspaper reporter and public relations professional in Nashville, has volunteered to help us navigate this tricky bureaucratic path.
Advertising system. Dean Littleton, a Knoxville television station executive, has been working with ICONN for many months now in devising an advertising system that will provide much needed support for the entire organization. Dean’s knowledge of the online advertising world has been invaluable to us, and he has been generous with his time and ideas. We cannot put this system into effect until we have enough websites on board to break even, but with the growth that we experienced this past year, we believe that day will come soon.
Grant proposals. We are actively pursuing a number of grant applications:
- International Press Institute. Early this summer we began the first step of the IPI grant process by submitting a proposal that would internationalize ICONN. The key part of the proposal was a two-day conference in Salzburg, Austria in May 2012 that would introduce ICONN to a score of European universities. Other parts of the proposal including strengthening the technical JeffersonNet system, an International Voice of Freedom Award for Collegiate Journalism, and a three-year project of conferences and workshops that would concentrate on web journalism for collegiate journalists around the world. We received word from the IPI during the first week of August that our ideas had enough support within the organization to ask for a full budget. That budget was submitted on Aug. 30, 2011. We are currently awaiting word from that organization.
- Knight Foundation/National Endowment for the Arts Community Arts Journalism Challenge. ISONN, along with two of our member sites in Charlotte, N.C., submitted an $18,000 grant proposal in August to the Knight Foundation, responding to a call for innovative ideas related to journalism and the arts. We proposed building a news website for the Charlotte area devoted to the coverage of arts and arts events by young people of the region. We are also proposed two workshops that would train high school students and teachers in coverage of the arts.
- National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-up Grants. With a great deal of help from the folks in the Office of Research in the College of Communication and Information, we are putting together a proposal for a start-up grant that would create a third network in our system: the Interscholastic Online Literary Network. This network would be directed toward reviving the concept of literary magazines for high schools, but it would be for online publication and distribution rather than print. Literary magazines have long been a part of the scholastic journalism milieu (newspaper, yearbook, broadcasting, literary magazine), but cost and lack of interest among principals and teachers have made them almost extinct. We see this as an excellent way to offer students a service and opportunity most do not have. Our grant proposal is for $50,000, and we will post it online when it is ready for submission.
We also applied for the Knight-Batten Award for technical innovation in journalism, urging them to consider the JeffersonNet system. Unfortunately, the judges did not deem that worthy of the award. We are also preparing a small grant proposal to the NEA Foundation to support the online workshops that we are preparing for high school journalism teachers.
Conclusion
The Intercollegiate Online News Network sprang from an idea bantered about at a conference on web journalism at the University of Tennessee in 2008. It has been nurtured and sustained by the enthusiasm and energies of many people since that time — too many to name here. They all should be proud of what they have achieved. We look forward, not back, however. As we do, the future of ICONN looks very promising.
Jim Stovall
September 2011
