I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.
Jan. 9, 1997
By Devlyn Brooks
Staff Writer
It's hip. It's interactive. It's high-tech. And Bemidji State University officials are hoping that a new CD-Rom, created to extol the virtues of the campus, will give BSU a head start in the new market-like atmosphere of college recruiting.
CD-Rom, an acronym for "compact disc-read only memory," uses similar technology as the music recording industry in creating music compact discs. A CD-Rom disc is used in computers that are equipped with the technology to operate them, and can be used to store vast amounts of information on them -- much more than previous computer storage technologies.
BSU Admissions Director Paul Muller, one of two project directors, said the decision to move BSU into multimedia recruiting technologies was "carefully planned."
Previously, recruiting tools included a BSU viewbook, a full-color picture book of the campus, and a five-minute videotape showing and explaining life at the university. However, the age of the video, which needed to be updated, and emerging technologies, such as CD-Rom, made it an easy decision to switch to a multimedia technology, Muller said.
The BSU CD combines movie clips -- generated from actual videotape footage; animations and illustrations -- generated from computers; photographs -- digitized on the disc; and programming and text -- all locally produced by 250 BSU faculty, staff and students.
In all, the CD contains more than 425 individual screens for viewing and interaction; more than 250 illustrations; nearly 500 photographs; more than 2,500 digitized audio segments; and more than 20 movie clips and animations created for the CD.
Muller said the importance of the CD is not necessarily only the student recruitment potential, but also BSU's marketing potential and fiscal efficiency.
In an age where universities and colleges are vying for students nationwide, he said institutions need to do something to make themselves stand out. And BSU is hedging its bets on the CD, not because the technology is new -- in fact, among computer technology it is becoming dated -- but it is an approach relatively few colleges have tried.
According to a story in a recent BSU alumni publication, BSU was the first university in Minnesota and the Midwest, and among only 50 universities in the nation, to develop a CD.
Muller also said the CD made fiscal sense because the university spent as much completing the DC, which is expected to have a shelf life of more than seven years with periodic updates, as it would to produce a three-year supply of viewbooks. And it has virtually replaced the recruiting video which was expensive to keep reproducing.
BSU's CD differs from many other college CDs because it takes an interactive approach. Prospective students can explore the disc as long they want -- where the five-minute videotape was done in five minutes. Muller said studies show that on average students will spend 20 minutes looking at a CD.
Students decide which aspects of the disc they want to explore, and a game was also included in the production. The students gain points by perusing the disc, and at the end of the presentation they can redeem those points for gifts from BSU. Muller said it was a unique way to build the contact file BSU keeps on potential students.
Disc production costs about $40,000, Muller said, which is about average for a project like this, according to a national magazine in which BSU's CD was featured. However, he added it could have been more expensive had not a lot of the work been done by BSU faculty, students and staff.
"A lot of the other schools that have been able to produce a CD on the East Coat have large budgets and endowments they can use," he said. "But we had to do it with a lot of knowledge and skills by doing it ourselves, and an incredible amount of residual benefits was gained."
Unfortunately, Muller admits that as soon as Internet technology improves to the point that CD-quality images and audio may be produced on it, the "playing field" will be level among colleges because it will cost relatively little to operate the CD-like technology on the Internet.
So, BSU has more a head start in recruiting than it does an advantage, Muller said, but he is optimistic because BSU has honored 2,000 individual requests for the CD.
"By itself, it's not going to bring in any students," he said, "but it's a large piece of the puzzle."
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