The Columbia Journalist went live yesterday with election news from New York City.
The site aggregates stories covered by Columbia J-School students, including radio, photo, and text elements. Check out the “Browse by Class” menu to get an idea of how many different classes are involved.
Columbia J-School Dean of Students Sreenath Sreenivasan announced the project on his blog last week, posting a memo from Prof. Laura Muha, who is coordinating the project. She wrote:
Our goal was to create a year-round site that would showcase the
best of what we do here at the J-school in one easy-to-access
place; it will replace what was essentially a patchwork of sites
put together by individual classes and largely operating only
during the spring semester.
A great idea, and they’re just getting started.
Of course, I’d like to see something with a little design to it, and without an RSS feed, I might never see the page again. A quick “view source” shows a lot of unfriendly-to-web-standards tables, but that’s alright – as long as the students are learning how to use a simple content management system on the backend. They are, right?
I guess my biggest question is whether there’s a set of students editing this for the web, or is the content essentially just getting shoveled over to the site without much consideration for how it can be best deployed in the online medium.
[tags]j-school, columbia[/tags]