The well-documented turmoil across the media industry drove significant changes to student media at Bowling Green State University over the past several years, helping to position our students for success after graduation and improving the school’s visibility as a destination for future students. Most alumni with roots in BGSU’s student media – TV, radio, print, digital, design, PR – wouldn’t recognize today’s program as evolution created BG Falcon Media as an umbrella for all aspects of student media.
The biggest change rests in the name of our newsroom in our world-class building, the Michael & Sara Kuhlin Center (check out the video of our amazing facility), appropriately called the Convergence Lab. Rather than operating in silos like organizations in the past, our broad range of media outlets operates out of a single space, fostering collaboration and cross-platform content development. Students from multiple disciplines – journalism, public relations, and media production, which one might expect, but also majors as wide-ranging as history, visual communication technology, and dietetics – fuel our student-led operation.
Our brands roll up into the main website, BGFalconMedia.com. Like a lot of media organizations, we encountered – and still encounter – challenges taking a digital-first or platform-agnostic approach. Knowing the job market demands creating content with “one story, many channels” in mind, we continue to work to build that sort of muscle memory. The same holds true for social media where we focus on building audience and increasing engagement across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
While encouraging the spirit of cooperation, individual brands continue to operate with autonomy while building skills within their discipline.
Want to learn more? Read all about it in my LinkedIn post.