UANews Makes Improvements, Boosts Readership

University Communications, the office behind UANews.org and UANow, has begun to aggregate news about the University and will be increasing its readership and offering a weekly version of UANow.

One University of Arizona office is adopting a method that Yahoo! News and other major organizations have mastered: news aggregation.

The Office of University Communications, which manages UANews.org and UANow, is poised to be the primary source of news about the UA while connecting that news to a greater number of people locally and around the world.

The office has spent the last five years shifting its efforts from primarily writing press release and pitching news stories to media outlets to now gathering and disseminating original news content about the achievements and global reach of the UA's faculty and students. 

"It is imperative that we reach University supporters in ways we have not," said Paul Allvin, UA associate vice president for communications.

A series of changes and new introductions, some of which began this week, will make the office's philosophical shift more salient.

On Wednesday, the office began aggregating news articles at UANews.org, the University's news site, which had been gathered from third-party organizations.

Beginning Monday, aggregated articles will begin appearing in UANow – the weekday morning news summary which has been distributed for two years – with links sending readers to those external sites along with articles produced by UANews team members.

Aggregated news will always link directly to the third-party site rather than reside at UANews.org.

"The content must be interesting to people," Allvin said.

"Simply sending promotional material probably is not what they always want, so we will be collecting third-party news stories," he said. "In aggregating news stories from around the world, we think people will be surprised and impressed with the prestigious work the University is involved in."

Additionally, UANow will begin being offered in an additional format that, beginning Nov. 5, will be disseminated on a weekly basis.

This is happening also as the office, through collaboration with the UA Alumni Association, is increasing its readership from about 50,000 mostly on-campus readers to a largely off-campus constituency of about 147,000 readers – making UANews.org one of the larger news sources in southern Arizona.

A memo written by Christopher J. Vlahos, president and executive director of the UA Alumni Association, will be disseminated to the association's contact list on Tuesday with information about the changes. Individuals included in the distribution are only those who gave the association prior permission to be contacted by the UA, Allvin said.

Allvin said one reason why University Communications worked with the association to reach out to the alumni base is to boost the sense of connectedness with the UA and other members of the Wildcat family.

"Despite our national news coverage, we have people saying they never see or hear about the University," Allvin said. "But these are the stories people need in order to tell the UA's story; the information is not getting to the key audience."

For example, in September alone University Communications produced 116 stories about the UA. Conversely, 7,482 stories were produced by agencies across the nation and abroad – such as newspapers, Web-based sites, wire services, television and radio programs, magazines and other publications.

"We want to make these connections so that people can begin to understand the full breadth and depth of what the University is doing," Allvin said, adding that the motive is also to be sure that people are aware of the many ways the UA is "an engaged participant in vital discussions around the world."

All readers will also have the option of receiving the daily distribution of UANow – or the new weekly version that will launch in early November. The weekly version, which will be disseminated on Thursdays, will feature the top 10 UA news stories of the week.

"People like simplicity, people like to breeze through and get information that is very quick and easy to read," Allvin said. "That is UANow's number one most popular feature. It is quick, simple, austere news every business day." 

Those who choose to opt out of receiving the daily UANow will be offered the option to sign up for the weekly version.

This should be especially beneficial to those who want to "cut through the sea of information and noise and get to the information that they are concerned about and care about," Allvin said.

Promoting University-generated content and hyperlinked articles directing readers to external sites on a daily basis is a model in use only by a select number of universities across the nation.

Stanford University and the University of Virginia run comparable news organizations with daily e-mail distributions, but most other higher education institutions with offices that produce news content – excluding student newspapers – tend not to disseminate information on a daily basis, Allvin said.

But the tendency to become more aggressive about news dissemination is coming at a time when the world of journalism – particularly in the area of news dissemination – is drastically changing.

Two major trends were widely discussed during this year's Society of Professional Journalists' national convention – news aggregation and adding hyperlinks to external sites, or "link journalism," both emerging practices in journalism.

Scott Karp, co-founder and chief executive officer of Publish2, spoke about "link journalism" during the conference, which was held in Indianapolis in August.

Karp explained a shift from relying strictly on original content, noting that news aggregators and those practicing link journalism purposefully drive readers to other sites. In effect, this is meant to drive readership at the local site once people begin to realize the value and the diversity of news being presented.

He said this is a type of Web-based social etiquette in which information sharing is expanded and original sources for newsgathering are outwardly credited via hyperlinks.

Allvin said that is the philosophy that is now driving UANews.org.     

"The catch and keep habit has turned into the catch and release," Allvin said. "There is a multitude of voices and stories, and we are organizing the content by what is most interesting."