proposal for student news orgs. —Presented by: Carl V. Lewis, @carlvlewis —Presented for: mercercluster.com editorial team Prepared with and Markdown by a proud Mercer University Bear and Cluster alumnus.
mobile —(i.e., we're setting embed widths in pixels instead of percentage widths; YT video embeds that aren't responsive; worse, not properly adding paragraph spacing because we copied body copy straight out of InDesign).
ever known in online news circles. Definitely not the type of work that will get you hired in industry by the time you graduate... sorry, kiddos. Although certainly still important, you need more than good writing nowadat – you need strong digital storytelling skills.
dedicated Social Media Editor position?!? Why aren't we hyperlinking more, all filing breaking stories between print cycle, including art with every article, creating multimedia and interactive components, etc.?
visited mercercluster.com last month. —No more than 3,000 could have possibly read print edition, because that's all that's printed. —So where is our audience? Clearly, on digital and mobile platforms, not in print products —Why, then, do we put 90 percent of our resources into the print product when it's only a tiny fraction of our reach?
justification for doing things the way they've always been done just because they've always been done that way. —Obvious logical fallacy. —Formula for eventual failure.
young, digitally-literate journalist. You'll be leading digital newsrooms in your early career (I was the online editor at Savannah Morning News at age 22!)
art than they do content without art. —Digital is inherently visual medium. —Not getting or finding visuals is the equivalent of not getting all the facts or talking to the necessary sources. —Massive word count minimums simply to fill space leads to poor prose. Strong news writing is concise, cogent, to-the-point, especially online.