February 23, 2012 Welcome! The LakeVoice is up and running once again. A new semester, a new team which means even more comings and goings of the Newsroom. With a new start we build off the foundation those before us have laid. When we do this we rewire the machine they created. We chose our own path, our own mission and our own LakeVoice to create. When we do this we try to do it with respect, honor and understanding. However, we often run across the issue of hurt feelings, crossed communications and revised contracts.
For our first publication, the biggest issue we ran into was deciding whether to keep or discard our relations with other publications. As most publications, the more places our name shows up the more we get attention and the more views we receive. Relations with other sites and other news publication are important to any web publication that needs to keep its audience. If you stand alone then you tend to stand silently, unviewed and undiscovered.
We had to weigh the importance of our exposure through different relations and also had to decide if we were getting an equal balance of give and take. With the Statesman, we are given the space to publish stories from our web publication in print. However, we are not given content to fill our pages from them. Yes, we gain exposure but we do not gain in content, they do. Sometimes, it’s important to realize that gaining content is more important than gaining exposure. You can have all the exposure you want but if you don’t have something to show for it then you lose your audience.
We are trying to open more relations between journalism classes where we get content in exchange for the publication of their work as well as help with ideas for future stories. We also decided to try and re-examine our relationship with The Statesman and see if we can make it more of a give and take with them and with KUMD.
This will be an ongoing issue throughout this spring publication but with effort we can create stronger ties with our standing relations and possibly new ones to come.