Don’t discard that copy, recycle it
Creating an archive of your student’s work on the Internet
by Gary Clites
Originally published in the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund's Adviser Update, Fall 2000
A fellow adviser at my school (she teaches yearbook, I have the newspaper and broadcasting classes) is fond of telling students that newspaper is for people who like instant gratification, while yearbook is for people who want to have a lasting impact. She means that newspaper students research, write and publish material as it happens, while yearbook students create publications which students will use to look back on the events of a school year. While I do not entirely agree with the sentiment, I see her point. It is in the nature of newspapers, whether they be the Frankfort High Express or the New York Times, that yesterday’s breaking news can often be found lining the bottom of today’s hamster cages.
The growth of student publication sites on the ‘net, however, offers an alternative to this scenario. By creating an archive of your student’s work on the Web you can guarantee that it is available to both your student journalists and their readers far into the future. And, with a little planning, you can do so with only minor impact on the overall size of your site.
An archive is, of course, a library of your student’s work. Most of us have a filing cabinet or a bookshelf somewhere in our classroom or newspaper office stuffed with back issues intended to preserve the work of students graduated and gone. But we know that unless high security is maintained, those back issues tend to slowly walk away. Worse, as advisers change and offices move around, crates and boxes of old newspapers are often seen as more liability than library and and are sometimes thoughtlessly discarded.
The ‘net offers an opportunity to make that library easily available to everyone and, with a little careful backup of files, fairly secure from thoughtless destruction. Most of us, though, simply delete each month’s pages to make room for the new material we are about to put on the ‘net. My student’s Web site, The Patriot Press Online (www.chesapeake.net/patpress) was one of the first school publications on the Internet, going digital in late 1995. Today, the site includes an archive of many of our issues going back all the way to early 1996.
How are they used? I regularly hear from graduated staff members now in college or entering the professional world who have looked back on the work they did as members of the school newspaper staff. Some visit the site to download examples of their work to use on professional school applications. I also hear from our school’s graduates who’ve rediscovered our site on the Web and have cruised through the archive just as they might their yearbook as a way to remember the events of their high school days. My own students have used the online archive as a way to research background for new stories they are writing for the paper. An online morgue of old material is much easier to search than is a closet stuffed with back issues.
Those of us who create stand-alone Web sites for our publications on private or school servers will find creating an electronic archive much easier than will those who build their Web sites on Highwired’s easy-to-use templates. Material on Highwired (www.highwired.com [author’s note: Highwired is currently in the process of switching over from the highwired.net designation to the more popular highwired.com domain name]) seems just as disposable as those publications that line the bottom of a bird cages, with each issue’s material replacing the previous issue’s. I am afraid that the only alternative for Highwired publications would be to create a separate Web site as an archive, and that would pretty much defeat the purpose of using the templating system.
If you already create pages for your site using html or a Web creation program, building an archive is really no more complicated than creating an archive-link page and, when a given issue’s pages are no longer current, linking them to the archive page. If your site uses the common front page–linked to section pages design, you really need only re-link the front page to the archive page, and leave the section pages linked to the front page. Nothing to it... so long as you have unlimited server space on which to stack up the ever growing mountain of material in your archive. One issue of my student’s publication online takes up anywhere from 2 to 5 megabytes of space; a monthly amount that tends to add up over time and could make creating an online library problematic.
The thing is that the vast majority of that space is taken up by images, both photos and art that accompany the copy in every issue. The illustrations are great and, if your site is on a vast school server which can handle the archived pictures, let them be. But for most of us, the key to making an archive fit onto our server is to eliminate the art and photos. How much of an impact will doing so have? One digitized photo will take up anywhere from around 50 kilobytes of space to a high of around 800 kilobytes (if you haven’t properly compressed it). A full section of newspaper text (say the sports section) loaded to a Web page including headlines will generally take up only between 10 and 20 kilobytes of space. Therefore, eliminating photos will make archiving your student’s newspaper copy a fairly low impact venture. Remember, though, that it is not enough to simply delete photos from the Web page, you must also go down into your site’s image file and delete each photo file. Otherwise, you will have hidden the photo without saving any of the intended space.
Should you eliminate all the photos and art from the archive edition of your publication? That depends upon available server space, but I tend to leave a few photos with every issue to keep the text from looking too barren. Selecting out just a few photos from every newspaper to save also forces you to create an archive of the very best of your student photography from across the years. Not a bad exercise in itself.
Building each issue’s Web pages into a growing electronic archive can preserve the work of your student journalists. It can also allow newspapers to have the same kind of lasting impact that yearbooks claim. Very few computers, after all, end up in the bottom of pet cages.
© Gary Clites, 2000