Saturday, September 22, 2007

Nux at Captivate - day one

Nux is attending the Captivate Conference this week. Captivate is a time and place to meet and chat to other members of the student Media Conglomerate. This is a much needed time in the business of what we do, half the time as student medians we feel like we are sailing on a lone boat lost at sea…

The conference began very nicely today, with speakers from across the industry sharing their experiences and giving advice on ways in which student media can improve.

Today’s session began we Peter Barlow, Captivate chair, delivering the results of the survey the captivate team conducted with each participating paper. The survey highlighted some interesting and similar trends which all the papers share, such as apathy and funding issues.
Anna-Marie, the ex-editor of Perderby, then spoke about news room management and strategic thinking. Her talk highlighted ways to get ahead in the student media game by taking a few steps. She looked at the business of the media and as student media practitioners we must get to know how audience or clients as she refers to them. She also talked about Branding and the importance of presence on campus. Advertising was also looked at as newspapers battle with what advertising and making serious advertising decisions.
Nic Haralamous, editor of FM Campus, then spoke about the FM Campus and the revolution at hand. FM Campus is distributed to about 20 campuses across South Africa and it’s changing. In Nic’s presentation he included some the changes he is implementing at FM Campus. Their new website is one of the big changes Nic has implemented and he is hoping to create a very interactive portal with student bodies from all campuses with it.

Finally Gregor and Carly, the multimedia editors of The Times, emphasised the importance of multimedia skills within student media and the simplicity of its implementation. They both believe that multimedia is the future of young journalists because they are not scared of technology and are eager to learn. Their work at the times speaks for itself with amount interest that the public has shown just four months into its inception.

Today has been a very fulfilling day and I hope tomorrow’s discussions will take provide good results.