Nick Petrie

So, on the 10th of June I shall put my last issue of Redbrick to bed, it is the last issue of the year and my 59th involved with the paper.

As I have mentioned before I have lost all the posts I wrote about my plans and hopes for Redbrick this year, so all I can do is talk you through what we have achieved and where we think we can go in the future.

I see a lot of potential in the UK’s student media scene, I think it is woefully underdeveloped and many universities and their media groups should have better links with each other and better links with the industry. The student media scene is a great place for experimentation because the business model is different. It is an environment where risk should be encouraged and entrepreneurship supported.

Social media is the buzz topic at the moment, but it is the concepts that surround it that matter; relationships, community engagement and conversations – the interactions that publications have with their audience.

At Redbrick we have introduced a new website and a new approach to student news, we have diversified our multimedia offerings and we have brought student focused investigative journalism back into the core of our output.

This has paid dividends with fantastic traffic on the website allowing us to generate income through advertising and making sure we are speaking up for students when they need it the most.

As a student paper we will always be limited by our resources, our most precious being time (no one at Redbrick is full-time – although some of us like to pretend we are) and to this end certain aspects of our content will suffer. We have been weak on spelling this year, but we have improved the consistency within the paper, little tweaks that we believe improve the readability of the physical version.

However our big experiments this year have been online:

1. We have introduced a live blogging platform using Cover it live – this has allowed us to provide live coverage from a range of events. We have covered the big sporting fixtures, the Guild elections results and of course the final leaders debate that was hosted on campus.
2. We have introduced Audioboo and with this tool we have been able to give small updates on projects, off the cuff interviews and allowing students another means to connect with the content we produce.
3. Similarly, sections have also started podcasting, providing more analysis of issues that ran out of space in the paper and allowing the personalities of our editors and writers to come across to our audience.
4. We have a live coverage kit in the office that consists of a netbook, 3g dongle, camera, eye-fi card, power monkeys, dictaphone and other accessories which allows for instant setup when events take place and means we can provide up to the minute coverage of whatever we need.
5. We have introduced an iPhone app – it is a little basic (unlike The Student’s) – but they have a developer and we do not. Following soon will Android and Blackberry versions – we are looking to give students as many ways as possible to engage and interact with Redbrick.
6. We started the Selly Oak Crime Map – in partnership with the local police, providing students with relevant crime information about their local area and we will be developing the accompanying crime prevention information over the summer.
7. We have been using twitter, Facebook and other social media services to serve our content directly to users, so they do not always have to go looking for it.
8. Our Guild election coverage was the best we had ever produced with Audioboos of the candidates, a map showing where they have been – linked with photos showing what they are up to. A live blog that was pulling in tweets and commenting on the events taking place around campus and a continuous slide show of all the pictures from the two weeks of campaigning.

We have a couple more surprises before the academic year is out and you will be able to see those soon.

However even with all these experiments and services we know there is one area we haven’t had the success we were hoping for – our community. There are 28,000 students at Birmingham and whilst we have decent website traffic for our first year, it is not what we know it could be.

We also do not get as much discussion and debate on the site, via Facebook or on Twitter as we would like, so the aim for next year is to develop a real sense of community around Redbrick, with engaged students that participate in debate. It is a slow process – especially because of the nature of student media – we build good momentum and then we hit a four-week holiday so there are challenges to overcome, but there is no reason this cannot be achieved.

As I have said before, there is so much potential within the world of student media, students just need to continue grabbing opportunities by the horns and get stuck in.

No risk, no adventure.

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