How are SRU Student-Media Doing?

For this week's blog post, I took an in-depth look at each of SRU's very own student-run media outlets, WSRU-TV, The Rocket and WSRU-FM. Now I wanted to focus on these organizations as they put out quality work in their respective fields, but I often don't hear students say that they consume the media produced. The radio station doesn't track its listeners aside from who calls in, paper editions of The Rocket pile up in lounges across the university and WSRU-TV's YouTube videos get under 50 views normally.

However, after I had an interview with Dr. Fleming, the adviser for both The Rocket and WSRU-TV, I found that each are actually doing well and that I was looking in the wrong places for data. Dr. Fleming said, "looking at the number shares, likes, follows, comments, etc. on social media, neither group is suffering in terms of audience engagement," when asked about both groups she advises. See I was looking at physical aspects of The Rocket, the number of papers I often see stacked and unread, and the wrong social media feed for WSRU-TV.

One thing I was sort of correct on was the lack of documented evidence on WSRU-FM's listeners. However with that being said, I still talked to two members of the station as well as other students, and the problem isn't that the station isn't well known, it's just that no one has traditional radios anymore. Many said that if streaming were to become and option, that they would tune in, but until then they can really only tune in when driving around the area.

Overall, this project was extremely informative to me and I'm glad I got to look into each media outlet a little more.