For our generation, the online world and online media shape the way we receive information, fuel the entire entertainment industry and affect our social and career networking.
In this atmosphere of declining print advertising revenues and decreasing newspaper readership, development of online components and a distinctive voice has become vital for survival. More than that, however, online expansion offers a frontier for an endless amount of creativity and diversity of expression that print cannot provide. With a new class of student media leaders in place, Vanderbilt Student Communications will further integrate into online convergence.
Examples of online expansion abound within each media division, demonstrating the necessity of the online movement, and the potentially extraordinary benefits of amplifying a publication’s voice beyond the limits of this campus. In reflection of the surge of streaming video into mainstream media and into the common vernacular, Vanderbilt Television plans to incorporate and utilize YouTube in their everyday operations, a critical step in response to the changing role of a campus television station. The Slant, founded and formed online, plans to redevelop their Web presence by way of redesign and a new infusion of content onto the site. Orbis, too, plans to explore a site redesign and ways to increase its Web presence, on this campus, for Nashville residents and for beyond, reflecting the most rewarding aspect of an online presence: placing the voices of students on a plane beyond simply Vanderbilt. Meanwhile, The Torch is developing a blog aggregate for campus conservatives from other universities, while further promoting their ongoing blog project, Right-Wing Vitriol.
Beyond these individual steps, however, lies something critical. Many of the new student leaders expressed the importance of utilizing InsideVandy.com as both a means to increase site traffic, but also as a developing media community. In this inaugural year of The Commons, media’s ever-increasing move online mirrors the drive for articulated diversity of thought.
