University to Launch Online Publication

It's not news that print media is finding itself in a losing battle to the up and coming online media. And I'm not saying that your favorite newspaper or magazine won't still have a place next to your morning cup of coffee, but universities around the country have realized this trend and are starting programs to better train their journalism students for an uncertain world of online journalism.

The University of Central Arkansas will become the first school in Arkansas to launch an online publication. UCA's Department of Mass Communication will be offering a new course, Online Publishing II, in the spring semester of this coming year. The course is the first step in better preparing UCA's journalism students for this new media. And UCA isn't the first; schools like the University of Southern California have already started similar online publications.

An ABCNEWS poll from last month found that nearly half of Americans are now getting their news from online sources. In this poll, ABCNEWS found that 48 percent of American adults are going online to get their news. That's up from 37 percent in 2007.

"The future of journalism is going online. We've witnessed just in the last semester two major metropolitan newspapers shut their doors. So, the future is online and we want to be able to offer our journalism students some sort of training and how that differs from what we've traditionally taught them about writing for a newspaper," said UCA professor Jim Lovel.

Lovel, who will be helping to launch the experimental site in the spring semester, says the website will modeled similar to that of CNN.com before their recent remodel. The website will be run and maintained by UCA journalism students and be updated five to six times daily.

The goal of the site isn't to replace the university's current print newspaper, The Echo, or television news station, Channel 6 News, but to share content with them. Lovel says the goal of this news site is to a communal site that benefits every department at UCA.

The site will be dynamic and constantly changing. Reporters will have a channel for the different beats that they cover. Any department at UCA will be able to link to the site and readers will be able to post comments to the stories that they've read with the reporters being able to respond to their comments.