The Campus Press Blogs

By Justin Crawford, University of Colorado, Boulder

Blogs. Lately, this overloaded term seems to be on the tip of every tongue. Media professionals wonder how blogs will affect the bottom line. Politicians wonder how blogs will alter their communication strategies. Educators wonder how blogs will change campus life. And students? Well, students are already blogging, reading blogs, and assimilating the cultural changes wrought by blog technology. At the University of Colorado, Boulder, we recently dived headlong into this phenomenon with an experiment at our student newspaper, The Campus Press.

The Campus Press Blogs started as my professional project, the final test required of a Master’s candidate in CU’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I proposed that I would become a publisher and product manager, adding blogs to the Web site of the student newspaper, which was itself transitioning from a weekly print paper to an online daily. I would invite all members of the university community to apply to be bloggers and contribute their original content to the site. I would write a paper about it, and, if they deemed this project worthy, my advisers would award me a degree.

I never expected the blogs to draw more audience than the paper itself, and I certainly never expected an order from the dean to halt publication. But the blogs surprised us all.

Before I go too far, I should explain some context and terminology. To blog generally means to write content in a personal, conversational tone and to publish it online immediately in reverse-chronological order. Gawker Media, a company that produces several commercially successful blogs, adds some cultural context to that bare-bones definition. Gawker’s Frequently Asked Questions section says, “We have no pretensions to objectivity—no editorial board, no assigning editor, and no delays. We publish in real time. Weblogs are biased, personal, and funky.”

Blogs are part of a digital publication phenomenon best described by the term social media. This is the popular embodiment of the worldwide conversation that was hyped during the 1990s Internet boom. A decade later, thanks to free, open source technology, almost anyone with a personal computer and an Internet connection can instantly be a thought leader, a publisher, a contributor, a teacher, or a critic. Social media describes a many-to-many, conversational, indexable, archived library of online content that is growing every day through the contributions of countless individuals, including tens of millions of bloggers. Clearly, the technology enabling social media changes the way we receive content. But it also changes who produces, directs, and owns content and how that content is used. Therefore, social media and associated technologies have the potential to impact any field whose primary product is information.

The media business was at the front of my mind when I started this project, but, viewing it in retrospect, I think the project’s outcomes are every bit as relevant to educators. After all, universities are in the business of disseminating valuable information, and the revolution that is transforming our communication mechanisms will certainly leave an imprint on higher education.

But last December I had more immediate concerns, such as getting the proverbial ball rolling on this blog project.

I made contact with key individuals at the journalism school, including Colin Lingle and Daniel Schaefer, graduate students with similar interests, and Michelle Fulcher, faculty adviser for The Campus Press. Together we formed a new media working group that would meet and discuss the blogs and other new media subjects throughout the semester. With their help, I secured the enthusiastic support of Andrew Villegas, executive editor of The Campus Press.

The holiday season came and went. In January, I prepared a detailed budget and applied for a grant to cover our expenses for software and promotion. I also sent the budget to Paul Voakes, dean of the journalism school, and he agreed to help with expenses beyond the grant. In the end, this support was vital because the grant did not come through.

I started investigating blog technologies. There are hundreds available, but only a handful met my criteria. I wanted an inexpensive, customizable, well-supported, and well-documented tool with multi-blogger and commenter capabilities. I soon settled on Drupal (http://drupal.org/), a general-purpose, open-source, free content management system written in a programming language called PHP. Drupal is a popular, industrial-strength framework for building content-heavy interactive applications.

In early February, I stood up at the weekly meeting of the editors of The Campus Press and asked them to lend me their brand, give me space on their servers, and allow me to publish a new kind of content under their name. I also asked for volunteers to help me manage the product. This was a critical moment. Although The Campus Press is funded in part by the school, its undergraduate staff retain full editorial control of content. In other words, there would be no blogs if the editors did not want them.

But they did. Two editors—Whitney Levine and Debra Thiegs—volunteered to help manage the blogs. The other editors were skeptical but intrigued. I was ecstatic.

Next, with help from the working group, I got a copy of Drupal running and began modifying it to suit my requirements and vision:

• I made substantial changes to the software’s configuration. For example, I created roles such as “editor,” “admin,” “blogger,” and “recruit” and specified precisely what each role could do in the system.
• I customized the publishing layout. For example, I designed a new logo and several custom “skins” that bloggers could choose from.
• I wrote custom code. For example, I created a function to display the name of every blog in a list at the top left of every page. Later I enhanced this code to remove “stale” blogs, float prolific bloggers to the top of the list, and indicate which blogs had new content.
• I created custom tools. For example, I made a Web form that potential bloggers could fill out; the form included questions designed to ascertain the applicant’s interests and writing abilities.
• I wrote policies and procedures. For example, I drafted a publishing policy explaining the reasons content might be removed or a user banned.

During this phase I realized how essential the working group’s contributions would be. They helped me understand the baseline expectations of savvy blog audiences, managed my relationship with the newsroom, kept the technology humming, and critiqued my design and copy. I could not have completed the project without them.

Much of the initial work was totally novel to us. Take the policy document: This document said (in many more words) that a blog entry or comment could be taken down, and its author could be banned, if posted content included personal attacks, hate speech, or anything likely to cause a lawsuit. I consulted Phil Cauthon, the editor of Lawrence.com, an online publication of the Lawrence [Kansas] Journal-World, about the policy document. I ran it by Dan Pacheco, a product manager for Bakotopia.com, an online community provided by The Bakersfield Californian. I e-mailed it to Steve Outing, a new media columnist for Poynter.org, the online publication of The Poynter Institute, a journalism research and training institute. I contacted Doug Connaroe, an instructor at CU and the blogs editor for the Denver Post’s Bloghouse (http://www.denverpostbloghouse.com/). And I spent hours going over the document with the working group.

Everyone thought the policies sounded reasonable. But we agreed The Campus Press’s relationship with the university required extraordinary diligence, beyond what would be required of a truly independent publication. And we found no precedent to guide us. Ultimately, at the urging of Bob Trager, a CU law professor, we submitted our policies to Dean Voakes, who submitted them to the university’s team of lawyers, and we all waited. And waited.

Meanwhile, the working group and I devised a plan to recruit bloggers. We thought the best bloggers would be active, engaged students—the kind of people who join student groups, such as the Black Student Alliance, the 4-Wheelin’ Club, and the Philosophy Club. So I found contact information for about 60 student group leaders. Lingle and I called or e-mailed every one. We invited them to become campus celebrities, to lead discussions about their missions or interests. Unfortunately, this strategy yielded meager results. I do not think any of our bloggers came from this first round of recruiting. However, I am convinced that students who are already engaged in a student group have great potential as bloggers.

Next, we paid about $50 to send four campus-wide notices—two to students, two to faculty and staff. The first went out to students on March 7:

BE A CAMPUS PRESS BLOGGER!

Become a campus celebrity! CU students who want to be bloggers for The Campus Press can sign up now. No experience necessary, just a point of view and a desire to be heard. Blogs will be linked from The Campus Press Online and the best posts each week could make the front page! Application, FAQ, and more at http://www.thecampuspress.com/cpblogs. Tell CU what’s on your mind!

Applications began appearing almost immediately, and we had more than a dozen by March 15. Students, it seemed, wanted to see their work in print. We promised to make it easy and, furthermore, to stamp their content with The Campus Press brand. A hitherto-unrecognized demand—namely, the community’s yearning to speak, to participate, to lead conversations—found in us a willing supplier. We were inches from publication.

Meanwhile, Outing had applied a little more heat to the project by mentioning us in his column on Poynter.org. The resulting spike in traffic came before we went live, and we knew we had to move quickly to keep up. Plus, we had a tight deadline: Spring break would start on March 26, and scarcely a month after that, final exams. It was imperative that we open our blogs immediately.

The dean finally coaxed a reply from university attorneys, who signed off on our policy document. They merely required us to add a disclaimer to the bottom of every page. At 6:00 a.m. on March 21, I slapped the disclaimer into place and gave our first four applicants their very own blogs. The Campus Press Blogs were alive.

The first day’s activity was far more than we had hoped for. At the end of it, we had 11 posts and 11 comments. The posts were unique, some funny and some informative. We were thrilled. That afternoon, a blogger calling himself “Do Not Read” (which I will abbreviate to “DNR”) published a post including the words “faggot” and “queer.” In some contexts, such words would clearly violate our policy against hate speech. This sparked a discussion among the working group, the newsroom, and me. We agreed the words were not intended as slurs, and the post remained online.

Two days later, a blogger calling himself “Bïspənğnğ” implied in a flippant post that Villegas, the executive editor of The Campus Press, was fabricating a girlfriend and hiding a secret gender identity. Villegas, who had never met Bïspənğnğ, responded with an offer to punch him in the nose. Others in the community condemned the original post, too.

Bïspənğnğ quickly followed up with an intelligent piece about homophobia and The Laramie Project, a play about the murder of a gay man in Wyoming:

Many of my colleagues and close friends are homosexuals, but an anti-homosexual remark still appeared in my blog, and I wrote it. It was a light joke, but I strongly believe the culture of homophobia leads to hate and hate crimes. Understanding and discussion leads to acceptance and tolerance. I am glad this was brought to my attention. Let’s discuss The Laramie Project.

Could it be that the community’s disapproval of Bïspənğnğ’s original piece caused him to correct his behavior? I thought so. I was excited to see this mechanism—so crucial to a functioning community—at work on the third day of publication.

During that first week, the blogs accounted for an amazing 45 percent of the audience traffic on The Campus Press’s Web site. The second week was spring break, so nobody read the paper or the blogs. In the third week, the blogs accounted for 31 percent of audience traffic.

And then, in the blogs’ fourth week, tragedy struck the campus. Jesse Gomez, a CU freshman, was found dead in his dorm room on Sunday, April 9. He died early that morning after attending a fraternity party. It was the first major campus news event to engage our bloggers.

Bïspənğnğ posted “Boo The Greeks” on April 11, in which he blamed CU’s fraternities for Gomez’s death. “Every time you see a known greek, by reputation or paraphernalia, boo them!” he wrote. “In the UMC. On the quad. In class. On the street. At the bar. At their houses!!!”

A link to the entry immediately rose to the top of the “Today’s Most Popular Posts” list we had recently added to the front page of the online newspaper. It was a prominent position for a provocative headline. The post drew 17 comments over the next day, more than any other post that semester. On April 12, the post was quoted and linked in the comments section of a story about Gomez in the Boulder paper, the Daily Camera—someone in the Camera’s audience had read Bïspənğnğ’s piece, and they added it to the debate on the paper’s site. Soon after, commenter “ctheath” posted a response to Bïspənğnğ’s post on The Campus Press Blogs, in which he said,

But to speculate (because your argument is PURELY speculation until the autopsy comes out) that this is automatically the fraternities fault in Jesse’s death is completely immature and unprofessional. As long as we are speculating, i have heard from several people close to him that he often did Oxycontin and other pain killers...If this ‘speculation’ is true and he indeed also had a couple of key lights at Theta Xi (which p.s. isn’t a very ‘hardcore’ organization) is it still the greek systems fault???

I thought ctheath’s comment was legally and ethically troublesome. I said as much in an e-mail to the working group and the editors, and most of us agreed that the comment should come down. But Villegas was silent on the issue. After three hours, I took down the comment.

When Villegas finally replied, he took an unexpected stance on the issue. First, he said, Gomez had mentioned painkillers on his Facebook.com profile, and this was common knowledge among undergraduates. Second, Villegas said, “The Campus Press is controlled editorially by the students (totally undergrad) and we will work independently of graduate student, TA, faculty or adviser influence.”

Wow! Suddenly, we had unvarnished information—information that everyone below a certain age was already talking about—appearing first on the blogs. And suddenly, the editors of The Campus Press considered the blogs valuable enough to claim them. I saw this development as a significant milestone. Only three weeks after going live, the blogs were becoming a newsroom fixture. Still, my satisfaction mingled with reluctance; I didn’t want to give up my administrative and editorial omnipotence within the system. Villegas pulled rank, though. I republished the comment. Little did we know the Gomez saga was just beginning.

On April 15, blogger DNR published, but did not substantiate, an assertion that Gomez was under the influence of painkillers the night he died and that the painkillers were the reason he died. While ctheath’s speculative comment had fallen just within our rules, DNR’s assertive post crossed the line. The newsroom and the working group reached a consensus via e-mail. The executive editor pulled the post and issued a warning to DNR.

DNR was back a few days later with “Jehovah’s Witnesses Didn’t Witness Me :( .” This humorous submission was the most popular post of the entire semester, quadrupling the blogs’ normal traffic. Dozens of new users signed up to comment. Many of them came straight from Watchtower.org, the official Web site of Jehovah’s Witnesses, where an automated news search scans the Web for Jehovah’s Witness references.

The Campus Press Blogs attracted more visitors than the online newspaper for the first time during the week of April 16. But the blogs’ rising popularity did not diminish the paper’s audience. The Campus Press drew the same amount of traffic as usual during this time—around 300 views per day.

On April 20, thousands of CU students climbed over “No Trespassing” signs to participate in a marijuana party protest on Farrand Field. CU police photographed hundreds of people holding pot paraphernalia and blowing smoke rings and posted those pictures on the department Web site. Police offered $50 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of any person pictured. This unique enforcement strategy made national news. Villegas published a controversial post berating police for not issuing tickets on the spot, and CNN.com later linked to that post.

Blogger DNR couldn’t resist having his say. He claimed in a post on May 1 that he was guilty of trespassing on Folsom and smoking marijuana; he said he was identified and called into the police department but escaped conviction with a good haircut and a fake alibi. The Daily Camera found his post and wrote an entire article about it, quoting directly from his blog. DNR’s blog post was the news. I never expected this.

The blogs’ popularity was increasing in exponential fits. Many of our visitors came from Google searches (searches for “immigration” and “4/20” were among the most common). Public Radio International interviewed me (off-air) for a broadcast called “The Death of the Newspaper.” CNN.com invited CU’s chief of police and Villegas on air (which later fell through). E-mails and comments from Canada and New Zealand reflected the worldwide scope of our publication.

Then came finals week. The site’s traffic dropped to almost nothing as our bloggers and primary audience hit the books. It was a good thing, too. That week, DNR claimed in a blog entry to have special knowledge relating to the death of Jesse Gomez. He said he knew the person who sold drugs that he said killed Gomez. He called that person a murderer. And he promised to withhold crucial bits of this information from police. There was no question—this post violated our policy. It threatened a very expensive lawsuit. I immediately e-mailed the working group and the editors. With their permission, I took the post down less than an hour after discovering it. I sighed with relief after verifying that Google had not yet indexed the post. Next, after substantial debate, we revoked DNR’s blogging privileges. But it wasn’t enough. DNR had put the fear into us.

With summer approaching, most news staff would leave town. The paper would stop reporting daily news. Most faculty would work from home. And Dean Voakes saw the potential for negligence if the blogs kept operating. “Once everyone scattered to the four winds,” Voakes later explained, “nobody would be obligated to monitor the blogs.” So he asked us to “pause” the blogs for the summer.

Editors of the paper questioned the plan. “Let’s not punish our bloggers, and stop our momentum along the way, because of a bad apple,” Villegas wrote in an e-mail to the group. I also objected to the dean’s plan, for two reasons. First, I thought the pause would set a bad example. “I think [the pause] disregards The Campus Press’ audience and community,” I said in an e-mail, “and I think it teaches journalism students that disregard for the audience and community is acceptable.”

Second, I worried that the dean’s plan underscored an institutional resistance to change, which I believe threatens the viability of traditional media operations and journalism schools alike. When I asked him about this, Voakes said the school does include “pockets of resistance” to technological change, but he assured me that his sole motivation was to prevent negligence in the platform. Still, he rejected my proposal to hire a student editor to monitor the blogs for the summer. We halted publication on May 23. The blogs had popped and fizzled. Their audience and community disappeared with a few mouse clicks.

Many of us were quite disappointed at the time, but today I think it was the right decision. Sponsoring blogs on autopilot truly would put the university at risk. Furthermore, I consider the pause to be a measure of the blogs’ success: their calamitous conclusion signaled the extent and force of their impact. During 67 days of publication, The Campus Press Blogs became a crucial component of The Campus Press’s online product. The blogs’ traffic steadily increased from their explosive first week until finals. By the end of the semester, the blogs were drawing more than twice as many visitors as the rest of the online newspaper combined—on an average day, the blogs served 474 visitors, the newspaper 210. At the very least, the blogs were entertaining enough to increase the online audience of The Campus Press. If the blogs and the online paper included advertisements, the blogs could be the most important revenue generator in the entire operation.

The blogs’ popularity taught us something about the appetites of future news consumers. Simply put, more people visiting our college newspaper Web site preferred blog-style content to traditional news. It is hard to predict whether this style of content will appeal to this same audience in 10 years, but it may.

I should point out that The Campus Press Blogs content was hardly “journalism” in the traditional sense of the word. Blog posts rarely included detailed reporting. Content was conversational, casual, personal, occasionally litigable, and frequently unverifiable. The blogs were mostly just talk, not reportage. But “what people are talking about” has always been an important component of the news business. When our bloggers talked about the 4/20 pot protest in their blogs, CNN.com and local newspapers based stories on those conversations. The Campus Press Blogs showed us how blogs can be a source for news leads, tips, and stories, a source that is archived indefinitely and indexed by the finest information-retrieval services (Google, for instance) that humans have ever known.

On a few occasions, blog content on The Campus Press Blogs approached the quality of a newspaper editorial. Bïspənğnğ’s “Laramie Project” post is one example. Such posts hint at the journalism potential of blogs. Blog software is just a content container, after all; the nature of the content is entirely determined by blog authors. Blog technology potentially enables countless more authors to produce good journalism. I think future blog aggregators or nonprofit reporting collectives may pose a serious challenge to traditional media corporations.

We have a lot more to learn about the implications of social media. Luckily, the most valuable attribute of The Campus Press Blogs project may be its pedagogical utility. The students and instructors who worked on this project had an incomparable educational experience. We successfully introduced a major new media product into an existing newsroom on a shoestring budget, and in the process we engaged our campus and community in a fresh new endeavor. And, to my great satisfaction, our audience ate it up.

So, it worked. I received my diploma in May. Blogs are now a default component of The Campus Press online product (though any specific implementation of them is mired in a technical and/or political bog at the time of this writing). We all learned a lot about our audience. It should be clear by now how relevant these tools are to journalists and journalism educators.

I took away three lessons from this experience that may be instructive to educators throughout the academy: First, students are almost certain to surprise us. These new media technologies are called disruptive for a reason, and they do not become less so in the hands of enthusiastic young people. We do well to exercise caution and diligence when planning such experiments.

Second, encapsulated in the above narrative is a model for assimilating technological change. As an erstwhile member of the younger generation, I brought some technical savvy with me to campus, and I discovered a school sorely in need of it. Many students in every discipline do the same. At a time when all fields are undergoing unprecedented technological evolution, such students can help higher education institutions stay current and relevant. That is, if universities can find these students and enlist them.

Third, technology is changing the way we communicate with one another, and the social impact of this change is likely to be at least as great as changes wrought by the invention of the printing press or the television. Members of the generation now in high school will expect to be treated as participants in a grand conversation rather than as passive consumers of education. They will expect their contributions to be incorporated, with attribution, into the subject matter. Some of them may expect to be paid for contributing bits of information or analysis to a body of knowledge. If the university’s culture does not keep up, future students will have countless alternative forums to consume and contribute to. And some of these alternatives may be entrepreneurial competitors in education—commercial endeavors, independent instructors, and other universities.

In the media business, technology has dissolved established boundaries between producers and consumers and—in the process—has severely shaken the industry. Educators should be prepared for changes of the same nature and scope—vast revisions to the roles and relationships defined by traditional educational models, driven by innovation in communication technologies. At this very moment, a service, widget, or protocol that will completely transform our campuses could be incubating in one of our dormitories. Are we prepared to seek it, recognize it, and embrace it?