UW-Milwaukee’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communication has launched a rebranded news media Web site, Media Milwaukee.

Two years ago, UWM faculty member Jessica McBride started a news Web site to publish the work of students in journalism programs. Since then, students who produced quality work have had a chance to display their reporting skills on frontpagemilwaukee.com. The site domain was originally donated by Maelstrom Solutions, a Web site builder.

The move to Media Milwaukee [uwm.edu/mediamilwaukee] was, in part, to create a site that would take advantage of multiple forms of media to present news. McBride credited Richard Meadows, Dean of the College of Letters and Science, who made funding for the site possible.

“I felt the natural progression of the site [Frontpage Milwaukee] was always to make it more of a multimedia site rather than an online newspaper,” McBride said.

The move to a multimedia platform is a reflection of the curriculum changes in UWM’s Journalism program. With the news industries being overtaken by the digital age, students are being encouraged to gain experience in the various mediums of print, radio, television and internet.

“We are taking the emphasis away from the idea you are going to graduate with a newspaper major like the old way,” McBride said. “Instead [we] are emphasizing core skills, information gathering and disseminating, writing and reporting.”

The content of Media Milwaukee will continue to come from the work that students are turning in for their journalism classes. Media Milwaukee will serve not only as a source for Milwaukee news, but also as a portfolio for students to take with them into the job market.

Perhaps the biggest technical change for the site is that it is now on the UWM server. This gives the department complete control over the site; something they did not have when operating on Frontpage Milwaukee.

The new site has a layout different from Frontpage Milwaukee. It now appears more like other online news media sites, such as JS Online, which readers may find more familiar.

Assisting McBride with the editor duties and building the multimedia element of the site is Jane Hampden. Hampden will be working with integrating “PantherSound” with the site. “PantherSound” serves as a radio-styled platform for students to produce news stories.

Frontpage Milwaukee had a feed to PantherVision, yet because of the nature of the site, it was limited in its functionality.

“It was very clunky to upload audio, there was no home for that,” Hampden said. “It did not look nice and it was hard to get to. So this is just much more professional.”

McBride and Hampden are optimistic about the future growth of Media Milwaukee. Possible supplemental projects include producing a print version of the site’s content and the development of a student-run news radio program.

In the past, the department has earned multiple awards for their production. Awards include PantherVision being named the best student news broadcast in 2003 by the Northwest Broadcast News Association, and Frontpage Milwaukee named for Best College Online Reporting in 2008 by the Society of Professional Journalists.