Social Media Fuels Growth of Student-Run News Organizations: They’re Competing with Traditional Media

The news waits for no one in our 24 hour, social media-centric cycle, and now, there’s a new major player among professionals – college students.

Student media has benefited by maximizing the power of social media, says Dan Reimold, journalism professor at the University of Tampa. Reimold is widely-considered to be an expert on student run journalism.

“The most exciting and important progression among the student press has been online, the alternative outlet,” Reimold says.

The ‘alternative’ news media comes in two forms, according to Reimold: the snarky, magazine-style outlet that intends to challenge the dominance of the traditional school newspaper and the more ‘class-oriented’ magazine that is inexpensive to create but can gain a lot of traction online.

Reimold suggests that online media has allowed students to “grapple toe-to-toe with major media … in real time, breaking news. I think it’s the single greatest development in student media since the creation of the student newspaper.”

One extremely successful student media website is Onward State, which is run by students at Penn State. Onward State is owned by the Lazerpro Digital Media Group, the company that also operates StateCollege.com. While student-generated news is still evolving, Reimold says Onward State is a ‘textbook example’ of how social media can push online student brands onto the national consciousness.

Despite its success, Onward State has had its share of trouble. In January 2011, the website mistakenly reported that Penn State football coach Joe Paterno had died. The blunder made national headlines. Onward State issued an apology.

Reimold called the error an ‘unfortunate scenario’ in Onward State’s third year, but noted its social media presence has stayed intact because of how it was handled. Everyone may have seen the mistake, Reimold said, but they also saw Onward State survive the misstep.

Following a trend in the mainstream newspaper business, the Daily Emerald at the University of Oregon recently made the switch from a daily newspaper to an online-heavy, twice-a-week paper.

In the months since the switch, Daily Emerald Editor-In-Chief Andy Rossback said social media has become the most important way to reach readers.

“To put it simply, the front page of our website, we found, is not where we get our traffic. [It] comes from Twitter and Facebook,” Rossback said.

“Absolutely everything we do is on social media. On our website, we write the ‘five W’ stories typical of a daily newspaper – who, what, when, where, why – in print, we rewrite that story in a contextualized way,” he said. “We’re speeding it up online and slowing it down for print.”

“We are serving our audience better than ever – we have the ability to get something up, to get something on our site … you can balance, divert resources to covering breaking news as it happens on the web.

“It’s been very successful, that’s not to say it’s perfect. We have tons of work to do to get better.”

Rossback said he and the Daily Emerald staff are “highly responsive” to criticism and feedback. It helps to tackle a problem head-on.

“There’s no going back, we’ve gone down the rabbit hole … the power’s there to be harnessed,” Reimold said.

By the numbers

Onward State has nearly 38,000 followers on its Twitter account and more than 35,000 likes on Facebook.

By comparison, Penn State’s independent student newspaper, The Daily Collegian has about 28,000 followers on Twitter and nearly 9,000 likes on Facebook.

Reimold said the trend toward online media will continue to grow in coming years with more audiences flocking to get their news on the Internet.

“Color me optimistic – more and more students are going to get the hang of the idea,” he said. “It’s exciting times.”