28 March 2012
Flinders Indaily is a recent significant expansion of an existing relationship Flinders University had with Solstice Media, an independent Adelaide media group. Solstice established Indaily nearly three years ago, with Flinders being a foundation sponsor. At that time Flinders contributed one page of Flinders news to Indaily each fortnight. Last year, Solstice proposed a Flinders Indaily which would take all of the Indaily content, add one page of Flinders news, views and video content each day and distribute to a new database of subscribers to be developed under a Flinders masthead.
The new site was launched on 6 February this year.
According to the university, Flinders Indaily complements its existing mainstream media activities and has a number of other very appealing features. Flinders is working closely with a number of the university’s community partners (SA Museum, State Theatre Company, Panthers Football Club, Business SA amongst others). In writing stories about those partnerships, the university says it is supporting those organisations and expanding its community engagement. In doing so, the university reaches an audience of potential students, research partners and donors and generally raises its profile in the process.
The ‘media rich’ character of Flinders Indaily is another appealing aspect of the venture. Solstice is producing, with the university, four news videos per month. The Wastelander Panda video and the Wave Rider Energy videos are great examples of the opportunity that Flinders Indaily offers to showcase the achievements of its graduates and, implicitly, the high quality of its teaching. The vision generated by the new videos will also provide cost-effective content for university web sites, touch screens on campus and in its CBD presence, and ‘news grabs’ for television networks. Similarly, the editorial and video content can be shared with community partners for their web sites and publications.
In being web-based, Flinders Indaily provides links to the university’s web site and include extensive links to teaching and research staff, course information, areas of research expertise and university events like public lectures. While it is early days in this project, the venture appears to be attracting an interested audience with the average time spent on Flinders web site by people referred from Flinders Indaily being 11 minutes in February.
Subscriptions are free and the subscribe link can be found on the top right of the page.
