Twitter Takes the States, Plurk Rules in Southeast Asia

An excellent recent post by CICM intern Lauren Rabaino reveals in pie chart form what those of us following student media’s attempts at Twitter have long known: Is quality tweeting taking place?  Not so much.

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Two-thirds of the 50 college media Twitter accounts Rabaino looked at are either solely serving as tiny-url advertisers for stories on the outlets’ sites or saying nothing at all.  The Daily Tar Heel‘s recent tweeterific real-time coverage of a campus bomb scare at UNC is proof that Twitter *can* be harnessed as a news tool at the student level.  Is it happening in any sustained sense as of yet?  I am a follower of most of the accounts cited in the Rabaino breakdown and I can safely say the answer is a resounding no.

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Now here in Singapore, Twitter is about as relevant as a winter coat.  The student-age social media elite of S’pore and Southeast Asia instead are (at times quite rabid) aficionados of a competing microblogging service: Plurk, the “social journal for your life.” I recently dove into the Plurk-osphere and want to boldly declare: It is FAR superior to Twitter in a number of ways.

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Chief among them: It cuts down on the overwhelming randomness of Twitter-mania, providing a clear-cut timeline to follow and the ability to respond to specific plurks, building a much stronger sense of community.  In this latter respect, student bloggers here use the service to hype their posts and create quite a following, in part because they are able to communicate directly to their friends/fans much more conveniently than via the big T.  Also, an honest confession: I find Plurk simply to be a lot more fun than its chief competwitter.

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What do you think- Twitter or Plurk?

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Same Old Stories, Semester after Semester

As part of my research into the Singaporean student press, I have been conducting long-form interviews with every current and former Singaporean college journalist who matters.  The sitdowns so far have taught me some interesting truths about journalism in Singapore certainly, but even more than that they have revealed that certain tenets of college journalism are shared worldwide.  One biggie: what I call the SOS SASS (same old stories, semester after semester syndrome).

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There are simply some stories that on a scroll through the archives of any student media outlet pop up again and again and again, sometimes with a fresh spin, but always with the same core issue or topic intact.  Some are universal and others are school-specific.  At Nanyang Technological University, which houses the lone college journalism program and the longest-running college student newspaper in Singapore, the SOS are about busing.  Specifically, they deal with the inefficient transportation system to and from and within the school.  The most recent issue of the NTU student newspaper voiced a spirited related complaint in an opinion piece.  During a recent interview with a former chief editor of the newspaper, I showed him the issue.  His first reaction upon seeing the article with the busing reference: “Well, the headline’s different, but we basically wrote the same thing five years ago.”

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Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying SOS SASS is necessarily a bad thing.  I mean, the college media audience (at least the core student one) is ever-changing.  Student press staffs are also always turning over as well.  And some issues deserve repeated reporting or editorializing, sort of like the incarcerated main character Andy in Shawshank Redemption writing his weekly letter for years  in order to secure funding for the prison library.  But within my research, I haven’t come across an instance in which SOS SASS has been the result of such an organized, long-term undertaking.  Instead, the same old stories tend to get written simply because j-students aren’t aware or don’t care that they have been written about in the past.

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What can we learn from our student press predecessors? What is the value of yellowed student newspaper issues or now-archived Web pages displaying past student media efforts?  A flip through these print-and-Web treasure troves can provide a history lesson about how and how much things have changed at your school and also, more importantly, in my opinion . . . what things have stayed the same.

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And so, along with ensuring all issues of a student press outlet are archived and available online or in the newsroom or campus library, I contend that all student staffs should consider mining those archives for story ideas, seeing what’s been covered and how it’s been covered.  The potential for present content is tremendous!  Timelines of important issues, more direct compare-contrasts, This Day in School History siders, and strengthened arguments galore.  For example, it’s one thing to complain about university busing at present.  It’s quite another to quote a mid-nineties article in the same student publication making the same plea for better campus-area public transport that apparently continued to fall on deaf ears.

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Students’ Questions About the Future of Journalism

I recently asked my news editing students here in Singapore: What is one question we should all be asking much more often about the current state or future of journalism?  In the age of j-reinvention, coming up with the right questions to ask seems as important as finding the right answers.  What question would you like to ask?

 

Below is a smattering of their responses:

 

How does a journalist keep reinventing him/herself?

 

What skills do future journalists need in order to survive in the changing media landscape?

 

What does journalism- currently a sunset industry- mean to us in the modern world?

 

How realistic is it to keep championing objectivity as a basic journalism tenet?

 

What are we giving readers that they can’t find anywhere else?

 

How can we retain our readers in this changing media climate?

 

Is journalism a dying industry? (Because if it is, why are we here?)

 

What happens when the new generation gets bored with the hard news that really matters?

 

When will the media truly be considered free?

 

Do you pick up the papers to read every day?

 

Will print media really be dead, especially once the new generation takes over the world?

 

Is journalism really informing the masses for the better?

 

Is there integrity in journalism today?

 

Why are you doing what you’re doing? 

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National ‘Enquirer’ News

I swear I’m not playing hometown favorites!  Yes, I am currently in Singapore, and yes this is now my second post on The Enquirer, an independent online news outlet launched earlier this month by impassioned j-students at Nanyang Technological University.  But the paper has more than earned this follow-up post, in part by its appearance in more blogs and news articles over the past few weeks than almost any other college media outlet or issue that the RSS aggregator Gods have placed before me.  

 

 

The latest story comes from The Straits Times, the national newspaper of Singapore.  It connects the site’s start with students’ concerns about the administrative censorship of a recent article in the NTU campus newspaper, The Nanyang Chronicle.  Accrding to Enquirer co-founder Chong Zi Liang (affectionately known by some within the university as “Francis”):

 

As the Chronicle is funded by the university, the administration has the final say on whether some stories can or cannot be reported. I felt there was a need for an independent avenue to report these stories which can’t be covered in the Chronicle.

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