j's scratchpad

Disclaimer: I never speak for my office on this blog and I’m certainly not doing it now. I am responding with my own thoughts.

SJ asks and several others have asked how the distribution of news at and around Harvard can be improved.

One problem is Harvard’s decentralized nature. Who would own, care for, and run the news kiosks at major points around campus? Dining and residence halls fall under the jurisdiction of the various schools. Areas near major thoroughfares could fall into several jurisdictions. Where do bus stops fall?

Then, there are all sorts of decisions about how to distribute news (Bulletin boards as SJ has already mentioned? Newspaper racks with The Gazette and The Crimson? Something completely different? (John Cleese reading the day’s headlines?)) and what news to distribute.

The Events and Information Center in the bottom of Holyoke Center already kinda serves this purpose. It has numerous publications from all over campus, including medical, public health, and dental school publications, as well as other information.

The Harvard Homepage has been including news for about a year now. There’s a bigger effort around campus to push more news onto the Internet. News now plays a bigger role in several schools’ redesigned Web sites. The powers that be are beginning to realize that people use the Internet to find news about Harvard. Now we need to work on getting people to recognize that news needs to be organized and archived.

Are getting Harvard’s hundreds of publications to use RSS feeds enough? A list of links on the Web obviously isn’t enough anymore. Highlighting some stories is a good start, but it isn’t necessarily adequate or relevant. Encouraging people to use My.Harvard to set up their own specialized news pages could work better. What’s next?

(Watch: this’ll be the one day my editor and director decide to read my blog. (Hi!))

Okay, Fisherman, I took your bait like a stupid fish. Where’s your next cast going to go and what’s on your hook?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2003 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.