Yesterday, in the basement of the Campus Center, members of our student-run newspaper, online magazine, radio and television station came together for the first time in recent memory and set a plan in motion that will launch us into a new era for student media at UMass.

Student media has a long and storied tradition here at UMass; the Daily Collegian was founded in 1890 and has been printing daily since 1967, WMUA 91.1FM went on the airwaves in 1949, and UVC-TV 19 started operations in 1974. The Amherst Wire is the new kid on the block, bringing web-only multimedia features to the table in 2008. Each organization has a unique identity and culture, separate offices, newsrooms and studios spread across three buildings, and its own processes for gathering and distributing news on campus.

The purpose of yesterday’s summit was to have people from each group meet face-to-face and open up channels of communication, paving the way for a collaborative workflow in delivering a more unified news experience to readers and viewers.

Here are the major topics we covered:

Cross-media cooperation map

One of the first things we did was map out the informal collaborations already taking place between organizations. After a break-out session in the second half of the summit, we added new connections to the map where common ground was discovered.

For instance, UVC-TV will support the Collegian’s foray into web video by training its staff, and in exchange the Collegian will print UVC-TV’s programming schedule. The Amherst Wire gave the Collegian rights to run AW stories in their print edition on slow news days, to reduce the need for costly off-campus wire services. WMUA, UVC-TV and the Collegian will collaborate on interviews with local artists and bands, to be broadcast on radio and television as well as published in print. Arts & Living editors from the Collegian plan on shooting a film review videocast in UVC-TV’s studio. And the Amherst Wire, the Collegian, and UVC-TV will work jointly on a project to capture student opinions and organize them in video blog format.

Style guide for multimedia journalism

S.P. Sullivan got the ball rolling on the creation of a shared style guide for content distributed across platforms. The Collegian has one for its own operations, but most others don’t. Standardization for copyediting, lower thirds, bugs, attribution and more will go a long way toward consistency and professionalism in our news products.

Going forward, we will likely form a committee with members from each organization to work on assembling a multimedia style book, using the Collegian’s guide as a starting point.

Next steps and formalizing the network

By the end of the meeting, we identified the need for putting a name on our newly formed collective. We’re not going to take the totally converged newsroom approach (we love our respective headquarters with their beat-up couches and cozy, family-like atmospheres too much to abandon them just yet), but rather create a distributed network of shared content and shared projects while still doing our own things at the same time.

One possibility is the UMass Student Media Network (don’t quote me on that, though, it’s just a working title for now). We’ll share a web server where we can dump raw video, photo and audio files via FTP, host a member directory, and keep each other posted on the latest news and what we’re doing to cover it.

The most important step to take, as pointed out by Collegian news editor Will McGuinness, is that we all incorporate each other into our daily workflows. We need to shift into the mindset that we’re all part of an extended network of journalists on campus rather than fragmented groups that don’t communicate. It’s time for each of us to get onto the other’s e-mail list and vice versa, so when a breaking story happens, we can pool our resources and report on it from every angle.