Student media in Ireland is all but offline

Why aren't Irish student newspapers online? Few have sites with content pages, a few more with just PDFs, others with out-of-date PDFs, and more with no working website at all.

Trinity College newspapers, the Trinity News and TDC SU's the Record have websites. Although at the time of writing the Trinity News homepage read "Offline for maintenance until Wednesday, 19th March, 2008," (strangely the content bar the home page is still accessible via the site menus).

At this stage, I should mention I'm the editor of the Ballyfermot Post, a newspaper linked in with print journalism course at Ballyfermot College of Further Education.

 NUI Galway SU's Sin at least has PDFs of their latest editions here. The UCC Express is also in PDF format, while student magazine Motley has a site, but the news section does not seam to be updated in a while. Things go down hill from here.

Queen's University's The Gown has a blog, but no sight of the newspaper's content - or at least not much of it - in any form. While DCU's the College View has a site where the paper can be accessed in PDF format, but the last one is dated November 2007.

UCD's College Tribune has only a PDF dated 14th November 2006. The same college's the University Observer - seen along with the Trinity News as one of the big two papers - is nowhere to be seen online. Their site, until very recently, stated that it would be launching "December 2007". At the time of writing, using the link for the site shows up a directory folder which end users shouldn't really every see.

It's 2008

Domain names and hosting are now as cheap as chips. Content management systems (CMS) are easy to use and set up. The Wordpress CMS - which is free - is being used by a number of daily and weekly regional newspapers in the UK.

Too time consuming? Well then the least you could do is put up a simple website with contact information and all PDF versions of their papers.

At the Ballyfermot Post, we're using Typepad which includes the cost and trouble of hosting. Like Wordpress it's customisable as much or as  little as you want. Typepad words for us our site, ballyer.net, is on the same account as this and other sites (ie it's costing nothing extra).

Have we seen any benefits? We're just a three edition paper in a small college, but as mainly a result of being listed on Google News sometime before our second edition we're received hits to our website four times as high as print run. Although the web hits and print runs are not directly comparable, the site has received wider spread then it ever could have just in print. 

If any Irish college newspaper sites are missing from the above comment below.

Comments

[jazz biscuit]

Actually, it's 2008. :)

Good post!

[Cian]

Thanks on both counts, fixed now.

[James]

University of Limerick's SU's An Focal has latest pdfs here:

http://www.ulsu.ie/index.php?categoryid=154

[Bren]

Analogue is a music mag based in Trinity. We have all our content online as well as pdfs of the mag and a regular blog...

[Sam Fitzpatrick]

As webmaster of UCC's Motley Magazine, we used the site more as a resource to run interactive competitions from the competition (such as our UCC's Next top Model Competition which has online voting) rather than a portal for students to read all the years magazines content. We put up one of the three editions content online. If myself and the editor had more time, we'd have put a lot more content up, but I had a lot of other sites to manage.

[Cian]

Sam, I know what you mean by time consuming, I really do. So, please read anything above as criticism of a collective, not any one editor, web editor or webmaster who can't do everything on their own without support.

In fairness to you and the rest at Motley, the Next Top Model web stuff is top notch. But I would still say publishing PDFs is better then having out-of-date news or other content sections.

[Cian]

Also, here's two more I missed in the above...

RCSI Student Medical Journal
http://www.rcsismj.com/

TDC's Icarus magizine
http://www.icarusmag.com/

[Simon]

The College Tribune do have an issuu account...

www.issuu.com/tribune (login required)