- Chosen News Organization: The Daily Illini
- Proposed Idea: Semesterly humor/satirical edition of the paper
- With all of the negative stories that appear in the news these days, I think our student population could use a pick-me-up. We would like to entertain the idea of creating a once-a-semester comedic paper. This would not only include humor from our own writers, but also from local businesses. Some of the ideas for this paper could include:
- Sports superlatives: Coming up with funny “awards” for UIUC athletes and coaches and writing a blurb for each one.
- Local business meme competition: We don’t have too many ads that aren’t in house at the moment so local businesses could submit memes about themselves and the winners could get published. They may have to pay to enter.
- Make fun of ourselves: Sometimes we take ourselves too seriously. We could find some complaints that people have made online and use them to create some self-deprecating humor like a true gen-Zer. We could use some content from the UIUC Reddit page.
- Crazy Massmail update: This could be memes about recent Massmails from the Chancellor.
- Crazy Police Blotters: This could be a fun way to sort of make fun of all of the things that have been going on on campus (an insane amount of vehicle thefts, big parties, etc.).
- With all of the negative stories that appear in the news these days, I think our student population could use a pick-me-up. We would like to entertain the idea of creating a once-a-semester comedic paper. This would not only include humor from our own writers, but also from local businesses. Some of the ideas for this paper could include:
- How we’ll go about this: We would start out with a comedic section in the paper. From there, we could put out ads to attract advertisers and get students excited about a funny edition of the Daily Illini. Then, perhaps before the end of this semester or next semester, we could finally release an entire paper featuring the funny ads as well as all the funny stories. It could be a shorter paper (maybe a 4×4 instead of a 6×6).
11/6 Critique
- For starters, I really like the cover of the salary guide, and the rest of it was pretty interesting as well. I don’t know if we usually use covers like that for this edition, but it seems right on par with what we’ve been talking about the last few weeks
- Thursday’s paper had a good cover page from my perspective. The stories seemed interesting, or at least comparatively to the articles within the paper. I also think the pictures have improved, and they aren’t blown up to take up a huge amount of the page.
- The main article on the cover of Monday’s paper is good, and the update on our region is a little less exciting but I think it’s necessary. I’m a little bored by the students experiencing burnout, because all I’ve heard since school started is burnout, so I’m not sure if that’s great news right now. I also liked the picture for the main article, but I guess there’s not really action happening in it
- the layout of 3A for Monday looks a little weird to me with the two pics at the very top and then all text the rest of the page, but I don’t really know anything about layout so I don’t know if that’s a fair critique
- I like the layout and cutouts on 1B for sports in Monday’s paper. More interesting to look at and read through
- I think the features article on the age of politics skewing representation might have been nice for the cover in Monday’s paper. The graphs look good and I found the article more interesting than students experiencing burnout, but I guess there was already a graph on the cover
- Our online felt like it kind of just operated as normal, so we probably could have done more with updates for elections.
- The video we posted for election day was pretty good and I liked the incorporation of interviews into the video, another instance of the voice of the interviewee playing nicely. Not a huge fan of the football video we posted because the narrator just has a really low energy and it sounds like he’s whispering
- Probably could have posted a lot more about the election on social media, like some live updates and things like that
Post your critiques
For this week’s class, the assignment is to critique both of the print and all of the online editions from this week. Post your comments in the Responses:Critique category.
Student Innovation Competition
- Meme/Satire edition once a year or once a semester; this type of journalism really resonates with our generation and I think the DI doesn’t always have the best engagement with students at the university. This would also give the DI a chance to connect with students from across the country.
- Create another sector of the website for reader’s to submit their ideas: what do students/our community want us to cover? Do they want more videos, photos, graphics, etc.? We can’t always predict what the community wants to read or hear about as students; we are kind of in our own bubble as college students. This sector could also include polls or surveys to better narrow down content
- Daily Illini Snapchat – students may not want to wait for us to produce a video following a sporting event, music event, protest, etc. so why not show them what is happening live. Snapchat is arguably the most used app of our generation and could better connect us to students. It would also be a good way to “tease” our more professional content so when we do put a video or a story out about the event people will be more enticed to check it out.