Web advertising

As a total neophyte in the world of web advertising, I started by asking my contacts how they price their ads for online student news reporting. I found that a lot of advisers are also neophytes, and mostly heard that it is hard to sell space in the online version of the paper.

Finally I decided to research the question on line, and I found a lot of helpful basics. Most of the answers lead to more questions of course, but now I feel less foolish as I attempt to understand what we need to do. Having the vocabulary is always a good start. So, now I know what the measurements are (pixels, duh). I also have a better understanding of how price and pixels relate. However, the emphasis seems to be on CPM (cost per mille), which means that putting a price on advertising before you have a history of page views is a guessing game. Still, when we DO have a history, we can either brag about it or keep silent until we've driven it up enough to brag about.

Page views and clicks. Those are more important than pixels. Now I know. Of course, it's still good to be able to talk about banner ads, sidebar ads, popups, pop-unders, floating ads, etc.  The best information I found is here:

Brain, Marshall.  "How Web Advertising Works"  08 April 2002.  HowStuffWorks.com. <http://computer.howstuffworks.com/web-advertising.htm>  28 June 2012.

While the date shows that the information is dated, I needed the primer.

Going Online!?

Before the school year came to a close, the club had a meeting (not well-attended) and decided that going online is the right route to pulling ourselves out of our financial problems as well as re-energizing our membership. The first result comes from the fact that we can do the website for something like $100 per year, compared to printing costs of $325 per issue. The second hope is that our members will be more excited because their stories will be published regularly, and we can report actual news!

This also adjusts the focus of our summer meeting: we'll be getting clear on the relationship between the newspaper (WolfPrints), the web site (achswolfprints.com), the school web site, the Wolf Prints Facebook page, Twitter, and Echo (our school learning platform). Then we'll have to quickly make some design decisions, do some fun journalism training aimed at newer members, and get down to the technical aspects of using our technology. That's a lot to accomplish in three days!

The JEA Outreach Academy I attended at SF State was a great help. I met another great group of Journalism teachers from the SF Bay Area, spent 3 days talking about issues of journalism education, bought a few really great new books on journalism, and picked up a slew of resources on all kinds of topics. My "bookmarks" listing is now overflowing.

Yesterday I met with the journalism teacher from Hercules High School, Natalie Wojinski. Two hours of sharing experiences and ideas left both of us with a lot more clarity and new ideas to try out. I know I'll be using Natalie's wisdom going forward, and I hope my experiences will give Natalie some additional inspiration.

Now, to the dashboard. I do need to make some background decisions for the online presence so we can hit cyberspace running in August. I'll have more to report in a few days after lunch with our Coach, Jay Gamel, and the co-publisher of Kenwood Press, Ann Quenan Peters on Friday.