By Nurul Hanani Hasmin
Campus journalism can be defined as an enjoyable activity of campus paper involving students and staff in collecting, organising, and presenting news, writing feature articles, commentaries, literary articles, taking pictures, cartooning, copy reading, proofreading, and writing headlines.
An online newspaper is important as much as the printed newspaper. It allows for instant updates, multimedia and video displays and more. It also allows the readers to interact with the paper itself, the wide range of access points also contributes to the success of online newspaper. The readers can get their news straight off their smart phone or tablets. News is at their fingertips in an instant.
IIUMToday is an official online news portal of International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). It was developed in early 2014 and has been officially introduced to the universitys community since May 2014. Â Since then, it has served as the official platform for students to put into practice their journalism skills and acquire first-hand experience in news reporting and writing.
Managed by the Department of Communication, Kulliyyah of Islamic Revealed Knowledge and Human Sciences, IIUMToday is a campus online newspaper that covers IIUMs events, happenings, issues and significant stories related to the IIUMs community. It acts as the source of information for its own community and also for the public to know about campus happenings.
The  online portal can be accessed through their website’s link news.iium.edu.my which is currently enjoyed by more than 200,000 readers on website this year alone. Besides the website, IIUMToday also can be accessed via social media such as Facebook and Twitter. In fact, they achieved in reaching more than 20, 000 followers on Facebook. Recently, there is a report that said most of the readers are women from the age of 18 until 24.
There are some distinct characteristics of a good online newspaper that we can see in the IIUMToday website.
Firstly, an online newspaper is more interesting if it is shareable. All articles published in IIUMToday can be easily shared through social media such as Facebook and Twitter. This helps the articles written by the students to viral through social media. Fun and interesting titles are also important to make a good online newspaper. With catchy titles, creative writings and interesting stories help to attract the readers interest to read the articles.
Other than that, credibility is also important in online newspaper. The more the quotations are included, especially punctuated by anecdotes, the more credible and news worthy a news item or story becomes. It is important that a journalist gives credit to the sources in their writing. In IIUMToday, most of the articles are written by the students, lecturers and staff from various departments within the IRKKS, and also from other departments and kulliyyah, which were often published as guest submissions.
In IIUMToday, the articles were published with interesting pictures. This helps readers to visualise and see clearly the stories that have been captured. More of visual stories are expected to be uploaded in the future.
Gatekeepers are needed to ensure stories are well written in accordance with certain ethical journalism practices. This is very important as the editors help to fine tune the stories and guide the students in both reporting and writing. The editors for IIUM Today consist of both lecturers and students.
The journalists of IIUMToday are students from the communication department mostly those who specialised in journalism and public relations. As practised by the printed newspaper, the online newspaper need to cover certain stories based on news qualities.
The first quality of news that portrayed by IIUM Today is proximity. Proximity means an event that may be the interest to local readers because it happened in or close to the community. Almost 90% of the news published by the students in IIUMToday are related with the campus event. Most of the articles are about IIUMs community. Since it is within the university, the students will get to know more on what happened in their immediate surrounding.
Next quality of news is timeliness. Timelines is news that is happening recently. In IIUMToday, most of the articles are current. Anything that is happening in the university must be published on that day it was happening. One of the purposes of news is to inform. Therefore, it is important to publish the news as soon as possible so that it reaches the readers on time and at the same time they get to inform readers about recent news.
Next quality of news that can be found in IIUM Today is conflict. Stories involving conflicts that people have with government or other people are often newsworthy, especially when the conflict reflects local problems. IIUMToday also publish stories related to the conflict faced by the staffs and students but there are not much articles of conflicting nature that have been published by IIUM Today. One example on conflict news that we can take from IIUMToday is the news about the discussions on Malaysia Sehati Sejiwa that was postponed for ˜not following procedures written by Atiqah Ismail &Â Wafa Awla.
In addition, human interest also can be seen as quality of news in IIUMToday. People like stories about people who have overcome difficulties or who seek to improve society and inspire readers. IIUMToday also published feature news to attract students and readers’ interest. For example, the feature news written by Azreen Azirinee Azizi Azizi about Tengku Ahmad Syamil, a young entrepreneur who was recently listed in Forbes Asia 30 under 30² for social entrepreneurs. Feature stories are usually published during weekends.
The role of IIUMToday online news portal is to inform, influence, interest and inspire the IIUMs community as well as the general public. In IIUMToday, the journalists learn how to write news and articles in class. There are some parts of the article that they need to know as IIUMToday journalists. The first part is the headline. The headline of the articles must catch the readers attention and should summarise the entire story in a few words. Byline contains the name of the writer and sometimes, his or her speciality. The bylines of the IIUMToday are written at the top of the lead paragraph.
Besides that, the lead of news is a very important part in article writing. The IIUMToday journalist has learned the right way to write the lead. The lead usually consists of the 5Ws and 1H questions; who, what, where, when, why, and how. It was the first or two sentences of a story. The lead should entice the readers attention to continue to read the rest of the story. The lead paragraph usually contains the most newsworthy information. Most of the news written by the IIUMToday journalists have managed to grab the readers attention by covering the 5Ws and 1H.
The body of the articles is also an important part in article writing as it provides details or further explanation about the lead. The body must be divided into short paragraphs of brief sentences. The students have been guided by the lecturer to understand more about journalism. To elaborate the lead, the lecturer has taught the IIUMToday journalists about the inverted pyramid style.
Besides news, IIUMToday also published feature stories. Feature stories are interesting articles that focus on certain personalities, places, events, or maybe subject matters like career, relationship, money, health, and lifestyle. Feature stories are usually longer, more in-depth and elaborate than hard news stories. A well-written feature stories should be well researched, catchy, descriptive, exciting, and reflective.
There are many types of articles or feature stories that have been published in the IIUMToday website. The first one is human interest and profile. Human interest discusses issues through the experiences of another person while profile articles talks about the life and characteristics of a prominent person. For example, the recently published article about Tan Sri Dr. Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor of Bank Negara Malaysia, following her achievement and retirement written by Shazni Ong.
Besides that the how-to type of articles. This are articles that most of the IIUMToday journalist published. How-to type of feature articles that educate readers by walking them thru how a process or an activity is done. For example, œSix important things to remember before attending final exam written by Saidatul Rosmera.
Every campus newspaper is established to help the students, same thing goes to IIUMToday. IIUMToday gives numerous benefits to the students in the present and the future. The first benefit of IIUMToday to the IIUMs students is national exposure. By national exposure, it means that it gives opportunity for students to be known to the public through their writing. This also helps students to secure jobs after graduating.
IIUMToday helps to train students on journalism and provides a platform for them to concretely practise the concepts of truth, fairness and balance. It also helps them to practise their writing, apply teamwork, group learning and organisational skills and at the same time provides an authentic learning opportunity to the students. Other than that, it helps to build academic vocabulary and develop higher order thinking skills.
By having IIUMToday as the official online news for IIUM, whatever that they publicise in the website is for the public to see and consume. Besides that, it is also a site for others to get to know more about information that they want to know on campus. It has indeed become an important means for students to promote their university to the outside world in the present world of connectivity. ***