UWIRE, a popular college-media aggregator that shut down abruptly last year, plans to resume publishing. So reports the blog College Media Matters, which claims that the resurrected UWIRE could go live as early as this week.
UWIRE compiled material from student newspapers around the country, and student newspapers in turn relied on the service as a source of national content that they could republish locally. The Web site used to be owned by CBS, but it was sold to Palestra.net, another college-news-network service, last March.
Palestra’s Tom Orr hopes to re-establish UWIRE as “the main pipeline for college media’s conversation with themselves and the world,” reports College Media Matters. Mr. Orr sympathized with student journalists who felt “burned” by the site’s demise, which he attributed to financial problems.
But the revived UWIRE now faces a new problem: competition.
Since it closed down, the Web site Huffington Post opened a lively college-news section with content from around the country. And undergraduates from Ohio University have also started their own college-news cooperative to fill the UWIRE void.
Ryan Dunn, co-founder of that site, tells College Media Matters that his service isn’t going anywhere: “Our sites are very different. We’ve been transparent with our finances from Day 1, sharing content exclusively with other student newspapers for free. … We think our setup gives student editors an easy choice.”
