Attention all Journalists, Listen to what Students Want to See

The job this week was to go around and ask a minimum of ten students at Southern Connecticut State University how they would like to see the school news being distributed and what content they wanted to read about. Whether it is through a newspaper, a web site or blog (online news), radio show or mobile access. With technology's growth in the past few years, one may guess as to how most college students would want to read the campus news. A series of questions follow, trying to collect enough information to really find out what exactly would students want to have on campus for news.
For this assignment, the easiest thing to do was make a survey 2 different ways. One way was putting the questions up on to a survey site called Survey Monkey.

After making the survey online, it is a good idea to put the survey out there. I linked it to my Facebook so all the Southern Students I already had as friends could see it and, hopefully take the time to fill it out.  Linking the survey to social media sites is a good way to get it out there for people to see.  The other way to get a survey out to the people is actually printing out a paper survey.
I printed out several copies of the survey and handed them to random students and asked for them to take a few minutes out of their day to answer the six questions.   This way, more of a variety of students were able to participate in taking this survey.
This is the link to take this survey, Whoo Gives a Hoot. Twelve people responded.  The results were somewhat expected.  Websites and word of mouth are the two most popular ways to get the news around Southern's campus. The two news distributors that Southern actually has, the newspaper and the radio, are the least popular to the college student.

In "Journalism Next," Mark Briggs said that a good way to approach mobile multimedia reporting is to concentrate on the elements of the story independently.

Since technology is so advanced, students were asked if the news around campus kept up with technology, would they be more inclined to read the news about things happening on campus.  The majority of the students who took the survey said that they would be more likely to read the news; but what type of news do they want to read about?

The Majority of the students said that they would like to see more events posted and put in the news.  Music and entertainment was the next big category students would like to read about in the news around campus. There was only one a few that actually suggested other topics; technology and opinion columns.
What if the news was made mobile?  What if an app was made? Would college students actually download the app and read/watch the news more often?  Students said yes, as long as the notifications didn't get annoying like some other phone apps.
Students for the most part, thought the idea of a phone app of some sort would become popular among the campus.  Most students don't keep up with the news on campus, unless heard by word of mouth.  If an e-mail comes their way, most just ignore and delete them.  Hopefully, with the ideas and data the students have given us something can be changed to get them more interested in campus news.