This sweet old man and his model of the UT Tower may not be a strategic priority, but they make a great story.

As managing editor of a higher education alumni magazine and news blog, I spend a lot of time thinking about story ideas. What are those brilliant topics/people/photographs/insights that will get readers excited, teach them something new or make them grateful they’re still in contact with the school?

Our editorial team goes round and round on what angle to take, the point of the story, the appropriate tone. Many of these stories require hours of research, interviews, reporting, editing and art direction.

And even after all that care and hard work, sometimes the story falls flat. No one reads it. Or they read it and think it’s a waste of time.

And then there are those “stories” that unfold like this:

1. An alumnus who graduated loooong ago writes you a letter and includes a printed photograph. The letter explains that the alumnus, now retired, finally achieved his dream of carving a model of a beloved university symbol, and he thought you’d like to see a photo of it.
2. You think it’s a sweet letter and photo, and your editorial pace has slowed down for the summer, so you decide to post it. (First of course you have to scan the photo.)
3. You quietly post it on a Friday and send one tweet about it.
4. It quickly becomes one of the most-read stories of the week and earns 4 comments.
5. The UT Facebook page posts the item and gets 260 Likes and 61 adoration-filled comments.

Sweet old man with school spirit: 1. Fancy story planning: 0.

Lesson learned? If you’re lucky enough to work for an organization that has millions of devoted followers, don’t forget to nurture that spirit and loyalty, even if it means you’re not doing a Big Important Story. And if you don’t have millions of devoted followers, what kinds of stories can you tell  to create some?

Artist Austin Kleon's interpretation of the "Try Making Yourself More Interesting" panel, a standout from SXSW 2009. I'm looking forward to Austin's "Visual Notetaking 101" session this year.

One of the things that I value most is that my SXSW experience managed to hit some high, soaring, inspiration notes while also giving me practical insight and tips. After the conference I reported back to my team at McCombs on my 5 big takeaways. Normally I wouldn’t share year-old notes, but these still influence me and my work on a regular basis, so here goes:

1.) Web site: The Big Picture
Alan Taylor runs the Boston Globe’s “Big Picture” photography blog, and he gave one of my favorite presentations of the conference. It was surprisingly moving–he had the whole room in tears as he explained a photo series of cancer patients–and totally unexpected. For me, this was a quintessential SXSW moment: a passionate person sharing something he cares about and using technology and communication to connect people and move the world forward. And as a magazine and blog editor, it encouraged me to remember the power of great photography and that even business stories can be visually compelling.
 
2.) Celebrate our Success!
This was a small point made in a panel about agency-client relationships, but it really stuck with me. Too often we are already on to the next thing, and hardly take time to pat ourselves on the back, beyond perhaps a passing “Nice work!” e-mail. We need ritual and ceremony to celebrate the completion of major projects. I’m still working on this one, but I did convince our magazine team to get out of the building for a 30-minute Starbucks break after we published our first issue of a new online version.

3.) People respond to being part of something bigger than themselves
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s keynote was a memorable highlight and Zappos seems to be a model of how to do company culture right. He talked about how for most people, happiness is tied directly to a higher purpose. For that reason, Zappos aims to move employees from job to career to calling.

I’ve tried to keep this in mind as a higher ed staffer. I mean I know we’re dealing with tight budgets, no pay raises, layoffs and unlimited bureaucracy, but it’s not like we’re stuck selling appliances! We are serving instutions that provide enormous opportunity for people and set them on a new life path. We need to tap into that inspriational side of our jobs more often.

4.) Social media allows for accidental learning.
I heard this nugget during a student panel about social media in the classroom, and it has sort of become my guiding principle in how I think about higher education social media. I know our followers and fans don’t read every word we say, but if I can trickle into someone’s news stream and get them to click on a link where they all of a sudden find themselves reading about how to be a better manager or learning about a student’s study abroad trip, then that’s a success.

5.) Be amazed.
I forget who showed this fabulous clip of comedian Louis C.K. complaining to Conan O’Brien that everything is amazing but nobody is happy. Frustrated your cell phone is slow? “Give it a second – it’s going to space!” The in-flight internet is spotty? You had to sit on the runway for 40 minutes? “Oh really, what happened next? Did you partake in the miracle of flight?”

Those words have popped up in my head often when I get pouty about truly insignificant things.

I have no idea what gems await me this year at SXSW Interactive. I’m hoping to engage my creative side and get tips on visual thinking, engage my geek side and check in with some science panels and engage my it’s-good-for-your-job-and-don’t-limit-yourself-it’s-more-interesting-than-you-would-expect side by visiting some business sessions. But whatever I learn, I promise to share here!

Any fellow SXSW attendees out there? Do any of last year’s lessons still resonate with you now? What are you looking forward to this year?

P.S. – A huge thanks to Austin American-Statesman tech reporter Omar Gallaga for including me on his list of 20 people to follow during SXSW Interactive. I’m quite shocked to be included with such a sparkling group, but I will do my best to deliver the goods!

If you’ve somehow not heard of the company and its one-for-one mission, here it is: for every pair of shoes TOMS sells, it gives away one pair to a needy child. (“TOMS” comes from “Shoes for Tomorrow.”)

The company’s founder, Blake Mycoskie, has become quite the celebrity in certain circles and has collaborated with everyone from Bill Clinton to Charlize Theron to Digg founder Kevin Rose. And the company recently earned the Secretary of State’s 2009 Award for Corporate Excellence, which Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton personally presented to Blake.

I got the inside scoop on TOMS when I profiled McCombs alum Melissa Chu for our Texas magazine article “Profit with a Purpose.”

Melissa is an intelligent, quirky soul who had tried nonprofit work but was frustrated at seeing good ideas fail to get off the ground because they weren’t backed up by solid business thinking. She thinks social enterprise ventures like TOMS are a better approach because balancing profit with doing good is a much more sustainable business model.

One of the perks of being a TOMS employee (in addition to 6 free pairs of shoes each year!) is participating in a shoe drop – the trips where volunteers travel to rural villages to distribute the shoes to children—many of whom have never owned a pair of shoes.

Melissa traveled to Argentina in December for a shoe drop and was nice enough to share some of her photos with us. Looking at the children’s grins—and their living conditions—gives a whole new context to the excitement of getting a new pair of shoes.

(To see captions, click the Full Screen button in the bottom right and then click Show Info.)

And yet, as a communicator now working in higher education—at the very university I graduated from—I struggle to infuse the stories I write with the lighter side of life. I find it especially difficult working at a business school, where the culture is more buttoned-down. But the culture isn’t boring and stuffy either, so what’s the problem?

One very astute alumnus commented on our magazine reader survey that we are “too afraid of [our] readers.” BINGO! I’m afraid of having a sense of humor in our stories, because I don’t want to offend people or make the school look silly. I included a Dilbert cartoon in our Spring/Summer 2009 cover story, and part of me sort of expected to get hate mail for it.

I don’t think that fear should drive my writing, but it’s not altogether unwarranted. Watch 2 minutes of the fun, non-traditional, somewhat silly student-produced Yale admissions video below and then read some of the 148 comments people left on a New York Times article about the video (Yale disabled comments on the video on its YouTube page.)

“I actually felt myself getting dumber watching that”

“For heaven’s sake, it’s YALE, not Taco Bell. With their miniscule acceptance rate, it seems hardly necessary to stoop to this. This is appalling. Selling one of the premier universities with trite songs and salad bars. So much for the dignity of the institution.”

“Embarrasing. [sic]”

“Really, Yale? Are you seriously trying to appeal to the “High School Music” demographic?”

“I absolutely would never have set foot on the campus if I had ever seen this. It’s disgusting, and they should seriously consider whether they want to risk losing alumni contributions (such as mine) by leaving it up. It is in remarkably poor taste for an institution as selective as Yale to have such breathless rhapsodies, tongue-in-cheek, or no (and I dare say any irony is worn pretty thin by minute 15) marketed to the 90% of applicants who will receive the `thin envelope’ in April. It’s not really cute, funny or ironic if you don’t get in.”

Ouch! No wonder we’re afraid of showing a sense of humor in our communications.

The good news? A large number of the commenters seem to support the video and admire Yale’s attempt at humor and innovation. It’s also surpassed 250,000 YouTube views in less than 2 weeks, so it’s certainly getting attention.

I’m going to keep trying to find my funny bone in higher education storytelling, but I think I better build up my backbone too.

Business school? Isn’t that where they study boring things like derivatives and fair-value accounting? What does a global health emergency have to do with business school?

Well, one of the discoveries I’ve been pleased to make since joining the McCombs team is that the business world (and business school) is teeming with juicy stories and fascinating people. And that business research and thinking touch all corners of society. This story is a prime example of that.

Paul Damien is a McCombs professor and statistician, and it’s his research I wrote about for this story. He’s working with faculty in Natural Sciences to study what factors affect the spread of H1N1 and to create mathematical models that predict infection rates. That information can then be used by health organizations in their outreach and education efforts and by schools and other organizations to determine when, if ever, it’s necessary to close down. And hopefully those efforts will prevent more people from getting sick or dying.

Damien is a great interview because he knows how to talk about his research in an accessible way, and he speaks eloquently about the importance of business knowledge and applications:

“Indeed any body of human knowledge has a business impact if you think about it. We use the word ‘business’ somewhat myopically at times. But business really means the buying and selling of goods and services. And what more valuable thing than the human body? And any research having to do with that is going to benefit business and the consumer.”

He further explains business school is about more than just training managers:

“When you think of business schools as a rule, the first thing that pops into most people’s minds is management. And then you think of accounting and finance, and then maybe economics, but then in stops, which is surprising because a major component is in analytics and quantitative analysis. A lot of my colleagues are involved in projects that aren’t necessarily business related. But they have business implications long term.

“So when you’asking what are the business implications for the H1N1, then clearly one answer is the pharmaceutical companies – how much of the vaccines should they produce. One interesting thing that came up from a business point of view was until about a month ago it was believed you needed two doses of the vaccine spread over a three week span for it to be effective. What is the business implication of that? It means you have to produce different batches of these things. The cost models, the revenue streams. But now they’ve actually realized that one dose is sufficient. So immediately that gets translated to the pharmaceuticals because that means their production processes can be better monetized because they don’t have to worry about coming up with two levels of doses. So right away the pharmaceutical companies become much more efficient models of operation, which in turn translates to better revenue for companies, and overall the consumer benefits in the long run when companies operate more efficiently, and that’s a proven fact.”

And as for the Swine Flu vs. H1N1 debate, while swine flu has a certain playfulness (One of the concepts our cover illustrator sent us was a strangely adorable pig lurking behind a chalkboard), we decided to follow the CDC’s guidelines and use H1N1 (except on the cover teaser – we couldn’t resist the “Solving Swine Flu” alliteration)

Plus, the pigs are probably ready to have their reputation back.

I’ve lost my husband. He’s crossed over to a mysterious, distant plane where I cannot visit. It’s called grad school.

Oh sure, he tries to invite me into that world, showing me projects he’s working on and sharing a few stories from class. We’ve even spent time together with some of his classmates, exploring Mt. Lemmon and taking in a fantastic Bon Inver show at the Rialto.

But I know there’s so much more I’m missing. He spends his days learning and discussing site analysis, perspective drawings, AutoCAD, ASLA, UofA—subjects and acronyms I know not of. When we’re outside, he starts pointing at plants and yelling out gibberish Latin phrases that sound like Harry Potter spells. He stays up late agonizing over every detail of his schoolwork. Who is this person????

We both moved to an unfamiliar city, but Travis has a place here. A new community of which he is a real and clearly defined member. But I don’t have that. Since I telecommute and work from home for my job in Austin, I don’t have my own new daily adventure. (I stress the word new here – working in higher ed communications is definitely a daily adventure.) I’m sort of a vagabond right now. I feel left out of Travis’s new life – as much as he shares with me, I’m not an insider. And that feels weird.

But more than feeling possessive territorial selfish weird about Travis’s grad school life, I am over the moon about the fact that he’s found something he loves to do and a community that can help him do it. I love that he has a passion to get lost in.

As long as I get him back from the dead grad school eventually.

*This mildly morbid but ultimately optimistic post brought to you by recent excessive viewing of Dead Like Me. Great show, but a little twisted.

Photo by Loz Flowers

What are your readership stats?
Our print circulation is 85,000. Some stats on the new online version: (since we launched in July 2009)

4, 536 visits
8,489 pageviews
3,262 unique visitors
7 comments

35.95 % of visits are from direct traffic
37.87 % from referring sites (918 from McCombs home page, 188 from Twitter, 131 from Facebook; #5 refererrer: images.google.com)
26.12 % from search engines (1, 185 visits from 877 keywords)

Note: Unfortunately we did not have analytics running on the old site, so I don’t have a benchmark to compare these to.

How long did this take, and what staff members were involved? What other responsibilites do they have?
From the time I sent inspiration sites to our web editor to the day we went live was 6.5 weeks. Both of us had prior experience with Wordpress, although he is not a Wordpress designer, so was figuring out a lot as he went along. One of our web designers stepped in for a few hours to help with some technical difficulties. Our web editor spent a few hours here and there researching theme (template) options and testing them on our servers. After that, he spent about 5 days customizing it and making tweaks, while I uploaded all the content and also helped tweak. Our web editor has many other responsibilities, and I’d say the magazine is about 50-60% of my job.

How easy is it for someone with little IT experience to build and use a site in Wordpress?
Very easy. If you can operate in Microsoft Word, you can operate in Wordpress. We have more than 10 blogs at McCombs running on Wordpress, and almost all are managed by people with little to no IT training.

How do you promote the online magazine?
We announced it in our weekly news e-mail that goes to all faculty, staff and students. The alumni relations team also included it in their monthly e-mail to alumni. Two of the feature stories were promintently highlighted on the McCombs home page for a few months. We also linked to it from our blog, Facebook and Twitter.

Does the content mirror your magazine?  Are there web extras?  Is anything in the magazine that’s not online?
The online content mirrors the print version very closely, but there are a few extras. In this issue, it’s mainly videos. In the future that might be photo slideshows, article sidebars, podcasts, polls and more. We put basically all of the print content in the online version.

Is it updated or changed more often than the magazine?
In the past, it wasn’t really feasible to update the Web version more often than the print (too much of a hassle). But it’s something we hope to do in the future.

Can you give different people different access levels?
Yes. One level can create a post, but not publish it. Another level can create and publish, but not access design, etc. Check out this post for a more detailed explanation.

Was it costly to create the site?
It was entirely free! Wordpress is free, and so is the theme we chose. There are themes that cost money, and if we hadn’t had someone on staff familiar with the technology, we would have needed to hire a freelancer to customize the template.

What template did you use? Did you customize it?
We used the Branford Magazine theme, and added a small amount of customization.

What files that I prepare for the printer can be used to create my Wordpress magazine?
Wordpress gets persnickety and can garble your content if you copy and paste directly from a Web page, email or even a Word doc. And although there is a “Copy as Plain Text” option on the Wordpress dashboard, it doesn’t always work. So I always copy content, either from Word, if I have a fairly clean copy, or from a PDF from the printer/designer if there were a lot of late changes. Then I paste to Microsoft Notepad, my computer’s plain text editor. That strips out all the formatting so I don’t drag any hidden code to the Wordpress post.

Photos may need to be resized or compressed to web-appropriate sizes.

Is it possible to link to previous versions not in Wordpress that are already on the web?
Yes. We created an Archive page that just links to all previous issues.

If links from section to section or to another magazine page are broken or not there, who fixes it?
In our case, I fix it. The Wordpress platform makes it very easy and intutive to create hyperlinks, so it’s just as easy to fix them.

Our web editor, Jason Molin, is working on an FAQ with a more technical focus (servers, php–things I know not of), so check his McCombs Web Works blog next week for those answers.

Resources

Other Wordpress publications (I’m an alumni magazine editor, so those make up most of my links):

Duke Research

Outreach (Georgia)

Swarthmore

Johns Hopkins Magazine

My ongoing list of alumni magazines using Wordpress on Delicious

Wordpress magazine showcase
Wordpress theme directory (search “magazine”)
Bestwpthemes.com free and premium magazine themes

And a special plug for the CASE College and University Editors (CUE) listserv, a community of amazingly talented and helpful people, many of whom we drew inspiration from for our own magazine.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. Thanks to this phenomenon called the Internet (I think it’s gonna be big), I also oversee the publication of our magazine online. Since it’s nearly all the same content and we’ve already completed the editing and proofreading, it should be no sweat to get the thing online, right?

Wrong. Not having a web team devoted solely to the magazine, it was always a scramble. But for our most recent issue, we changed gears and used the Wordpress blogging platform to host and publish the magazine.

I’m happy to say we’re thrilled with the result. I know a lot of print magazine editors are struggling with how to publish online, so I decided to chronicle our process here. This isn’t meant to be an all-encompassing explanation of Wordpress-hosted magazines, but simply a case study of our experience. Hopefully it’s helpful to others facing similar issues.

Where We Started

First, a look at how our magazine Web presence has evolved:

1998 – No images, single column of text

1999 – Thumbnail images, departments sidebar

2006 – Larger images, all content on front page

These sites were perfectly fine, and could even be considered somewhat advanced, given that many university magazines aren’t online at all or only exist on the web in PDF format. But there were key factors that just weren’t working.

Old Model

Dependent on web team
I’m not a web person, so our web team had to do all the work to create static html pages. But since they weren’t familiar with each issue’s content, I had to do extra work to specify what I wanted for every aspect of every page: urls, tagging, keywords, descriptions, title tags, photo selection, etc. Also, the magazine site was not a priority for them, so the whole process lacked a certain enthusiasm on both sides.

Time-intensive
All of that coding and creation of pages was tedious work, and it had to happen twice a year. Then, once the pages were up, I had to go in and proofread everything all over again. Going back and forth with a web designer over every typo, broken link, forgotten title tag or awkward formatting was a massive time-suck.

Little connection to print version, not very visual
The old version didn’t feel like an online magazine, and, except for a small image of our flag at the top of the page, didn’t feel like our magazine.

Lack of flexibility
Because it was such a laborious process, once the magazine was up, we just left it alone. No one bothered to think about ways to update it more regularly, because it just didn’t seem like a good use of time.

No reader engagement
Did you love or hate that article? Do you have some insight that might shed more light on the topic? Too bad, keep it to yourself. Our old model had no way for users to leave instant feedback and comments.

New Model

Using Wordpress to host our magazine content radically changed both the publishing process and the final product.

2009 – Large images, modules highlighting each department, multimedia elements

We’re in control
Uploading content to a Wordpress blog requires very little technical know-how. Because it creates pages for me, I was able to upload all the content myself and in a more timely manner. And the web team got to be free of a project they didn’t want. 

Very visual, more magaziney
We chose the Branford template, which was designed specifically for online magazines. Big images, customizable accent colors and a sidebar to serve as the table of contents. Now it looks like a magazine and the overall impression is more closely connected to the look and feel of the print version.

Easy updates and search engine optimization
We only publish the print version twice a year, but we’d like the online magazine to include more dynamic content. With the Wordpress platform acting as a CMS, it’s a snap to post new content or make adjustments to existing articles.

And the Wordpress SEO tools help our articles turn up higher in search results. Search engines have accounted for more than a quarter of our site visits, and readers have found us using more than 800 different keywords. Hello, new audience!

Built-in templates, tools and and add-ons
Because there are thousands of Wordpress templates–also called themes–available (many for free, including the one we used), you can create a snazzy site without starting from scratch. And if you think of a feature you want, either on the back end (like spam protection) or the front end (like a tag cloud), there’s probably a simple plug-in you can install to make it happen. Reinvention of the wheel not necessary.

Interactive
The built-in commenting feature makes it easy for readers to respond to content. Ok, so we’ve only had seven comments so far, but that’s seven more than we’ve ever had before!

So that takes care of some of the strategy and explanation of why we used Wordpress. Now how on earth does it work, and what if I don’t know anything about technology? Read Part II, where I answer some FAQs about skill level, time, cost and other factors. It’s also got a list of other online magazines using Wordpress and some links to help find a theme for your Wordpress magazine.