E-Media Tidbits

BigLickU.com No, the Rolling Stones aren't coming to town. But watch for a new site from the Roanoke Times aimed at SW Virginia college students: BigLickU.

...OK, just to get the snickering out of the way: No, BigLickU is not about sex or ice cream. Actually, "Big Lick" was the original name of the town that became Roanoke in 1882. In a Jan. 30 interview with Innovation in College Media (ICM), BigLickU general manager Chris Winston actually credits a Poynter Institute event as the genesis of the name. Go figure.

The site's content will be a mix of articles, forums, classifieds, and related content. According to Winston, BigLickU employs 25 or so students (some staff, some paid and unpaid interns) for writing, editing, and ad sales. However, the plan is for the vast majority of the site's content to be produced by the student community it intends to attract. No Times content will be republished on BigLickU.

ICM's Bryan Murley raises an important issue: Will BigLickU compete with, and could it harm, college media in its target region? In the interview, Winston denied this and instead extolled how BigLickU and local college media can complement each other without redundancy.

And yet, another ICM article on BigLickU excerpted a recent Ad Age article, Call It MyNewsPaperSpace(subscription required), in which Roanoke Times director of digital media Dan Wheeler is quoted as saying: "The idea [of BigLickU] is Facebook meets Citysearch meets Craigslist meets campus paper. ...It seems like a stretch for a newspaper to be doing this, but ...bringing people to advertisers ...is what we usually do." (Emphasis added)

It seems to me that the Times is smart to reach out in new ways to younger people in its region. However, as I see it, BigLickU would, at the very least, compete directly with campus media in terms of ad dollars -- especially since small local advertisers are notoriously parsimonious. At least one campus paper in the region (Virginia Tech's Collegiate Times) does not allow its student staffers to simultaneously work for BigLickU due to competitive concerns.

Obviously, some in the campus media community view BigLickU as an unwelcome and inappropriate incursion on their traditional turf. But is this move really a problem, or just business?

I'm torn on this: If indeed social networking ends up being a core focus of BigLickU, then it would be doing something very different from what campus media generally attempt, as far as I know. So in that sense they could be complementary, from a community perspective. However, campus media needs money, too -- and a big hit to ad sales could threaten its existence in some cases.

What do you think? Is the Times making a potentially savvy business move, are they cannibalizing a key training ground for journalists -- or both, or neither? Please comment below.

Another angle: According to Winston, BigLickU's design will emulate a university as a navigational metaphor. For instance, the current signup page for news of the launch is billed as "Early Admissions."

Personally, I'm a bit leery of that approach. When I encounter a Web site that attempts to pretend it's a physical place, it's generally a hokey, cumbersome veneer that ends up interfering with the user experience. However, I suppose it can be done well. After all, Second Life and other online virtual environments are pretty popular these days -- although I doubt a true virtual environment is what's been planned for BigLickU. We'll see.