Student Media Group -- Final Presentation

Our Site

Task List

• Northern Student -- Dave

• KBSU -- Jess

• FM90 -- Jessie

• Literary Publications -- Jessica

• Photos -- Dave and Jessie

• Site Template -- Jessica

Original Site Concept and Goals

This site will act as a supplement to the existing BSU media sites including the Northern Student, KBSU, and FM90 to provide info. about how people can get involved and also provide students and community members with access to events around campus and the community.

    * Introduce students to the campus media outlets (newspaper, radio, tv)

    * Make it easy to find out about events on campus and in the community through the site.

    * Provide information on how students can get involved in the newspaper, radios station, or KBSU.

    * Provide info. on other campus events; sports, plays, honors lecutre, recitals etc.

    * Direct students to the original Northern Students, KBSU, and FM90 sites.

    * Provide infotmation about the on campus media outlets that is not already given on the sites. 

Revised Site Concept and Goals

This site will act as a supplement to the existing BSU media sites including the Northern Student, KBSU, and FM90 to provide information about how people can get involved with the media that's available on campus.

    * Introduce students to the campus media outlets (newspaper, radio, tv), and explain what opportunities are available by working with them.

    * Provide information on how students can get involved in the newspaper, radios station, or KBSU.

    * Provide information on the faculty and student group members of the specific organizatons.

    * History of the organization.

    * Direct students to the original Northern Students, KBSU, and FM90 sites.

    * Provide extra information about the on campus media outlets that is not already given on the sites. 

Dave's Notes

With stated original goals in mind, I started the interview process and creation of personas. The interviews revealed that the initial intent and goals of the project were too broad for the users I was going after.

Potential users interviewed were aware of the online versions of the media outlets on campus, but admitted not using them. All interviewed said that they would not want to have to spend a lot of time on a site looking for specific information.

The content that was needed to be gathered was a relatively short list, including a contact phone numbers, e-mail, web addresses, and locations. A brief, brief history was said to be okay by those interviewed.

In the end, to keep my pages as brief as possible and my division shallow without skimping information, I used a lot of outside links and bulleted lists for most info, with a bare minimum on the main page of Northern Student. I tried to keep as much info possible above the fold on the screen, but sometimes ran long.

Problems:

content for brief history was scant. The actual history of paper doesn't seem to be properly profiled.

dreamweaver is not elegant, saving and "putting" 30 times for mistakes is a chore

brevity for pages is difficult to do at times

Interview One

• Grade:frosh, copy editor
• Major:creative writing
• Name:
• Organizations involved in? ns
• If yes, what aspect of your organization is the most important that students know? where to find it
• What aspect of your organiztion is the most overlooked? that it's run by students only

• Would you like to be involved in any of the student media organizations on campus?
• Have you ever published anything? no (If yes, where?)
• Would you like to publish something? yes

• Do you listent to FM 90? sometimes
• Do you read the Northern Student? yes
• Do you watch KBSU? no
• Which student media do you think is the most popular/important/represents the university the best? northern student, only because its scattered everywhere, and can be used at leisurely pace ---the other ones (radio, tv) we have to seek out

Based on these answers ask the followning:

• How often do you listen/watch/read? read once a week, listen sometimes - not often
• Where do you read? when i'm eating in lower union or in office
• Did you know about the online websites? yes, haven't really been on them
• If so what do you think is missing?
• What would you expect to find if you went to one of these sites? stories, playable video, archives, contact info

• What would you be looking for if you were to visit a student media website? how to join, purpose of each
• What would you expect to find at a student media website? staff listings, office hours, current content, schedules for tv, link to listen for radio,
• What would you like to know about the campus newspaper?
• What would you like to know about the campus radio station? playlists
• What would you like to know about the campus tv station? schedule
• Did you know that there are other ways to get your work published on campus? yes
• If not, what would you like to know about these other media outlets?
• Would it be helpful to know about:
• faculty/staff yes
• ways to get started yes
• history - possibly a brief history
• classes to take to learn more about media - maybe for non majors
• how to access different student media if you're not on campus -- yes

Interview Two

• Grade:soph
• Major:undecided - maybe masscomm, maybe pol sci
• Name:
• Organizations involved in? none

• Would you like to be involved in any of the student media organizations on campus? not right now, work schedule doesn't allow for extracurriculars at this point, and rent needs to be paid
• Have you ever published anything? no
• Would you like to publish something? maybe in the future

• Do you listent to FM 90? flip by quickly in car, usually cds
• Do you read the Northern Student? sometimes
• Do you watch KBSU? occasionally flip by kbsu, keeps flipping if it's sports, "I like the talk shows and the the news with amy goodman on there."
• Which student media do you think is the most popular/important/represents the university the best? tie between tv, newspaper ---both do news and talk about upcoming university events

Based on these answers ask the followning:

• How often do you listen/watch/read?
• Where do you ... dorm
• Did you know about the online websites? know of them, never been
• What would you expect to find if you went to one of these sites? current issue, broadcasts, at least the past couple of months issues,stories, videos...(i ask about a history section)..."maybe not a complete history, but at least something to give me a rundown of what it is...put the whole thing into context."

• What would you like to know about the campus newspaper?
• What would you like to know about the campus radio station?
• What would you like to know about the campus tv station?

inner workings of each (a day in the life)want to know what it's like to work there, how do i submit workd, what kind(?) of people are there, do they look for, what classes do you have to take beforehand, who is in charge of it

• how much time would you spend on a media site?

maybe 5 if they needed to something right away, "i usually poke around for about 15-20 minutes if I've nothing else to do.

Persona from interviews

on-campus second year student majoring in MassComm

• Patrick O'Shanrahan is a sophomore newly majoring in Mass Communicatios, and is just beginning to get through his general education classes for the department. Lives on 10th floor in Tamarack across the hall from friends, so much of his time is committed to hanging out with them. Most of his friends are going into different fields, so after they eat at Wally's in the morning they spread separate when class time comes. Patrick went into MassComm because of his adoration of Jon Stewart's skewering of the mass media, thinking he could do a better job than the current people running the media around the country. His experience working with the media is limited, though, and he wants to dabble a bit in each media format before deciding which direction to take.

• Goals

Jess's Notes

The results of our interviews showed that most students don't have a lot of knowledge about how to get involved in student media at BSU. While many showed interest in media, not many showed interest in spending time learning about media.

My goal was to put the information that our audience would want in short, scannable chunks of text.

I tried to not include a lot of information that wouldn't be of interest to the audience. However, during our interviews, most people said that they didn't really see the point in having the history of the different media on the site. I wrote a little about the history of television stations at BSU, anyway. While most said they didn't really care about it, a few thought it would be good to include it for the few who thought it would be interesting -- those who don't want to read it will see the heading and skip over it.

Problems:

deciding where to put the information that I had/how to divide the content into categories

Jessie's Notes

• My goal: wanted to emphasize how students can get involved, good opportunities, not enough students know about them

• Interviews: helped us to figure out the content. Found that they were for the most part interested in at least one of the campus media outlets, but didn't know where or how to get more info about them.

• Personas: looked to these for help with more of the content and navigation. Found out that most didn't have lots of time to look for the info that they wanted.

• FM90: http://calstaging.bemidjistate.edu/sites/BemidjiStateMedia/radio.html

• Problems: thought about putting up a calendar of meetings, but didn't know who would update it. Our original goals wanted to put up community and campus events also, but found out that that would be a whole new site in itself.

Jessica's Notes

Goals: to let people know who to contact in order to submit or join

• to give the reader an idea of what each of the publications are about

• provide a visual of each literary magazine.

People I interviewd wanted it short and sweet with enough information to help them decide if this is what they are looking for. Also, contact info was the most important detail.

Problems: Technical problems with Dreamweaver, getting things to behave in the right way, etc.