Will Sommer

The 1st document to find when covering a college

Whether you're a college journalist or covering higher education for another outlet, the first thing you should find  is the university's record retention policy. The document, sometimes called the record management policy, handles what document is held by what department and for how long. Getting it online, through a FOIA request, or from a university employee will simplify your document  searches, especially if you're filing FOIA requests. For example, take a look at the University of [+]

Guidestar and the Joy of 990 Forms

No need for this with public documents My tour of journalism books continues with William C. Gaines's Investigative Journalism. Gaines is a more exciting writer than Ullman, the last author I read, and he wisely steers away from technology issues that will soon become outdated. My favorite part of Investigative Journalism, though, is that it taught me about the 990 tax forms non-profits have to file. While journalists at public schools luxuriate in their open records requests, [+]

Politico memo shows what questions lead to quality content

I haven't delved into The New Republic's Politico article yet, but TNR's blog The Plank has a delicious memo full of advice on Politico's style. The Politico folks may be tools, but they were the biggest media story of the election season until Nate Silver came along, so their method is worth studying and maybe repurposing. The questions every Politico reporter is supposed to be considering about their story: a) Would this be a “most e-mailed” story? b) [+]

24 ways to improve your news site

Soon, you'll be slinging information like this guy Brian Murley at Innovation in College Media is trying to put together an informal list of online journalism ideas that could help improve a college paper's website (or any news site, really).  They're arranged in descending order of difficulty. He hasn't added resources for implementation yet, so I'm electing myself for crowdsourcing and doing it myself. Here are some tools to pull off each of Murley's ideas (except for [+]

3 Freedom of Information ideas for college media

Got the Act passed so you would use it What a treat the Freedom of Information Act and similar state laws are.  Besides the First Amendment, they might be the best dispensation society gives journalists. For FOIA basics, check out the free FOIA course at NewsU, the letter generator, and the state-by-state guide. FOIA requests, because of the time and (sometimes) expense they require, are most commonly used on large stories.  The best way to ensure that [+]

Why do papers still have reviewers?

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="323" caption="When the critic was king..."][/caption] What are most newspapers--especially college ones--doing wasting space and money on reviewers? In almost all cases, readers can get opinions from more respected tastemakers for free online. Reviewing is a blast, and can be wonderful to read. There are definitely places reserved for small publications, like reviews of art shows, theater, or local bands that won't be covered by more authoritative outlets. But when a reader can just [+]

The competition’s going independent…now what?

Georgetown has two competing papers: the Hoya and the Voice, my paper. The Hoya comes out twice a week and is the more official paper, while the Voice is supposed to be the counterculture alt weekly (we thought Vampire Weekend was the 2nd best album of the year, though, so take counterculture with a grain of salt). This isn't official official yet, but it's clear from a somewhat on the record conversation I had with a [+]