When this year’s Undergraduate Students Association Council members campaigned for their offices, they promised a scholarship portal. They promised to tackle housing affordability. They promised to make the campus more eco-friendly. What they didn’t promise was a localized version of NowThis that no one really asked for.
Come winter quarter, the USAC Office of the President will be launching the Bruin News Room, a news channel that will post weekly 5- to 10-minute shows about happenings around UCLA. News sources will include student clubs and social media, and even our very own newspaper, the Daily Bruin. Currently, the channel is in its genesis stage and the specifics of the show are still changing, with what was initially presented as a YouTube channel now extending onto Facebook.
Jack Guo, the director of USAC’s Committee of International Relations, said that USAC isn’t involved at all in running the channel, except for himself. So, not completely independent. The Office of the President’s Facebook page promotes the channel as a creation that is a part of the Office as well.
Taking the Office’s word for on who’s running the Bruin News Room, it is pointless for USAC to start up a visual version of the Daily Bruin and other news sources. Unless the Bruin News Room can offer something substantially different and innovative while reaching a large portion of the UCLA student body, setting up a news channel is futile on a campus where established news sources like Daily Bruin, the UCLA Newsroom and social media already exist.
Guo, who is heading this program, said that the channel would be a way “to keep students updated with events.” That intent is good because it’s important that students be kept abreast of what’s happening at UCLA. It makes you wish that someone had thought of a way of disseminating news and keeping students updated a hundred years ago, and named it something generic like the Daily Bruin.
In other words, the premise of the news channel is somewhat similar to the Daily Bruin’s. Their first shooting included reporting of the UCLA-USC game that took place last week – something The Bruin had covered as well. The aim of the program appears to be to fill in the gaps in the Daily Bruin’s news coverage such as speaking about club events not covered by the Daily Bruin, while using visual media as a way to better engage viewers.
Guo also said one of show’s aims was to be riveting and interesting. The first show included mentions of TechLA, a platform for startup internships, and Splash@UCLA, an initiative through which students can teach high school students. While the Bruin News Room is a program in its early stages, sprinkling news with bits from the classifieds can hardly be categorized as riveting content.
And this underlines one of the problems about Bruin News Room: there’s a distinct lack of experience in carrying out a news operation. The News Room is run by Guo and others, including members from Guo’s own committee collecting news, working in a zero-cost operation currently centered at the second floor of the John Wooden Center.
Guo also said he hopes to have about a thousand views at first, before it eventually grows to about twenty thousand viewers, including Facebook viewers. Twenty thousand viewers would either entail half the student body, or the Bruin News Room would be a news source for West Los Angeles. Even getting just a thousand views would depend on the right people sharing the video on Facebook.
Essentially, they’re aiming to rack up the views on Facebook, in the vein of a more news-based and less angry Tomi Lahren. But it’s important for them to note that Facebook’s view count paints an inflated picture of viewer engagement. Just viewing a video for three seconds, which can happen a lot in anyone’s news feed for a video that automatically plays, counts as a view.
Some might say that students need a variety of sources to get their news from. But if the Bruin News Room is mostly using news from other sources, then it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. And that means it will just add to the rest of the similar clutter in students’ news feeds. However, if it were to offer something novel to students that they can’t find anywhere else, then this program can become a worthwhile addition to students’ news sources. For example, UCLA gymnastics had a show called Bruin Banter, which functioned as a type of talk show with a guest from UCLA gymnastics. This kind of person-on-person talk show, instead of a newscast, would be a better format for this project.
And while Guo’s assertion that visual media is more engaging is true, in its current form, there appears to be no difference between the Bruin News Room and any group of five people doing the exact same news aggregation and online posts on Facebook and YouTube for no cost. With no actual news experience, this is just an amateur news show riding on the fact that you can collect news for free from organizations that spend thousands of dollars and time to get their own stories. For example, if you’re going to talk about the USC-UCLA game, something that has been talked to death all over the news, then you need to tell us something we don’t know already.
Otherwise, there’s no urgent need for UCLA to have its own, less popular version of The Huffington Post.