Duke Student Broadcasting has recently begun collaborating with GoDuke.com, the official website of the University’s athletics, to create sports-related content.
The videos produced by the partnership, called GoDuke.com Student Broadcasting, will eventually appear on both the DSB website and GoDuke.com.
“Duke Student Broadcasting is becoming the official student voice of GoDuke.com,” said DSB president Maddie Burke, who explained that the collaboration will allow GoDuke.com to “maintain its professional ambience while we bring to the table the student perspective.”
Rob McKinney, director of operations for GoDuke.com, said DSB’s participation will bring a new element to the athletics website.
“What we want from them, what they can do that we can’t, is get that angle from the student perspective and from the campus life angle,” McKinney said. “That’s their competitive advantage; they have access to their fellow students and how those students react to all things Blue Devil.”
McKinney said producing content alongside DSB will be similar to the way the athletics website currently produces media internally. GoDuke.com will have the final decision as to what is posted on its site.
“If we feel [a student-produced piece] meets the standards for GoDuke.com we can instantly make it available. If there’s feedback or tweaks that need to be done we’ll give that feedback,” McKinney said. “So while [students] will get experience, they are expected to meet the creative standards we have.”
DSB entered into discussion with GoDuke.com at the beginning of the academic year and the partnership officially began Sept. 14. Burke, a senior, said she had been thinking about the large national market for student-produced media and recommended to her contacts at GoDuke.com that they utilize DSB in order to tap into it.
“We work with students quite often so it was a really natural progression,” McKinney said. “Maddie was a big advocate of the project; she originally brought the idea of an official partnership to us, so we worked out the details of it to make it something we were comfortable putting our GoDuke.com name on.”
The main logistics that needed to be addressed before the partnership began were the logos DSB members would wear in the videos, the name of the partnership and certain workflow details, McKinney said. He emphasized the importance of determining a schedule for what DSB members would cover so as not to have their work resemble media content created by GoDuke.com’s own staff. Certain events, he said, will only be covered by members of DSB, while others will be covered by members of both organizations. Large events, such as the Alabama football game, are “all-hands” events, while “for smaller events it may just be a single student out there.”
“The beauty of this partnership is that it really gives us the resources to send a media representative to events that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten any coverage,” McKinney said.
While GoDuke.com Student Broadcasting has not yet begun work on any specific projects, McKinney said he and other members of the GoDuke staff will be holding a workshop for DSB members next Monday to give them “general guidance on the creative process.”
For the members of DSB, the partnership will provide new opportunities and a larger audience.
“It’s extremely exciting for us,” Burke said. “It helps us reach both local and national audiences and it provides our members with professional training in broadcasting. It’s a way for us to provide our members with better education and better engagement with the broadcasting world.”
DSB member Danny Nolan, a freshman, wrote in an e-mail that working with the GoDuke.com staff will be a great learning experience for students.
“Working with GoDuke.com is a great opportunity,” he wrote. “With a great partnership like this, it not only allows our hard work to reach a larger audience and expand our organization, but allows us to learn from the GoDuke.com staff as well.”
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