“You only live twice – or so it seems – one life for yourself and one for your dreams.”
-Nancy Sinatra
Welcome back, regular readers of the Spinnaker. We missed you grabbing issues out of the blue boxes around campus.
To all of you new freshmen living in the dorms, welcome to the first Spinnaker of the Summer 2012 semester.
We typically publish weekly, but for the summer we will release one issue in June and another in July. After that, expect an issue every Wednesday during the Fall semester.
As a brief introduction, we are the UNF student run newspaper that covers student related news, entertainment and sports. This may sound cliche, but we create this newspaper you are reading right now with students in mind. This product is for students, by students.
In this issue, we cover the city’s discussion of revising its human rights ordinance to include the LGBT community. We also have a movie review and a recap of the NCAA Division I Track and Field meet that took place on campus a few weeks ago.
But if you think newspapers are as old-fashioned as Clint Eastwood on his front lawn, or simply want to digest news in multimedia forms, then we have you covered. The Spinnaker is under the Center for Student Media umbrella, which also includes Osprey TV, Osprey Radio and Spinnaker Digital.
The convergence of these media platforms began summer 2011. We’ll admit, it has been a rough journey since then. Struggles between the four departments happened almost weekly because the mantra of our news gathering structure was to, ideally, be platform agnostic. But yet, devious staff members from each department lobbied for certain reporters to work just for them.
As proof of CSM’s beneficial growing pains, look no further than our website, unfspinnaker.com. The Internet has the wonderful ability to blend text, visuals and audio together to tell stories in innovative ways. But, alas, our website is under construction because it’s been poorly designed and managed since its birth in late 2008.
CSM’s dream and desire to give you multimedia content comes at the expense of convenience.
For too long, our four departments were complacent in staying separate. Why? Because it is much easier to do such. Reporters had to do less work, editors had to deal with fewer personalities, and Osprey TV produced shorter shows.
But if we stayed separate, we would ignore the current state of multimedia journalism. It would potentially get to the point where we would cease to exist.
Just look at the changing landscape of print and broadcast media. More magazines and newspapers are going digital; specific news video segments are accessible on a media outlet’s website.
From our 2011 convergence workflow to our current one, the restructuring finally provides a true, platform-agnostic news gathering crew. Spinnaker News, as it’s known, works separate from the four departments. This lets Spinnaker News focus on content while the other four departments exist for production purposes.
We’ll boldly claim that the greatest beneficiaries of Spinnaker News’ hard work will be Spinnaker Digital. The website will re-launch July 1. All the stories you will see in the Spinnaker newspaper and on the Osprey TV news show will be accompanied with exclusive photos and video. It will be the experience that media consumers are used to by now.
Are you confused yet by all the subsets of the Spinnaker brand?
This summer, you are witnessing the second life of the Spinnaker. We died April 30, 2012, when the current CSM structure went into effect.
But now we are rising from the dead.
