Failure can happen whether we try or not.

Success only happens when we try.

Failure, however, is not the enemy. Complacency is.

The concept behind the Tennessee Journalist is exactly why new media companies have an enormous advantage over their legacy brethren on the Web:

Part of the thinking behind the creation of the Tennessee Journalist is that it does not have a legacy; that is, it is free to explore the developing and expanding world of web journalism without any traditions – except for the tradition of the practice of good journalism. The web is a different medium, different from print and broadcasting just as those two media are different from each other. The audience expectations for news web sites are different than those of print or broadcast audiences; the relationship of the audience to the medium is also different. Consequently, the journalism found on this web site may also be different in content and form from that found on other media.

There is no institutional memory at the Tennessee Journalist. It’s a Web-centric publication dedicated to exploring and developing new ways of story telling. That’s why the Tennessee Journalist gets this week’s College High Five.

Too many college publications use the Web as digital archive of their print product. One would think that college media would be edgier, more modern and less risk averse than their MSM cousins. That’s fundamentally false. College media is often far more risk averse and even further stuck in a bygone era.

Most college media sites are even closer to their print counterparts than the typical newspaper Web site. It really makes no sense for a bunch of 18-22 year olds to be making a print-centric publication when all of their peers overwhelming consume content on the Web.

That’s a shame. College is a time for experimentation, pushing the boundaries, discovering new things and not being afraid of failure (it’s a lot less costly to fail in college than it is after graduation). If there was ever a place for journalists to take risks and try things that may not work, it should be in college media. College is the perfect time for failure.

That’s why I love the idea of a Web-centric college media publication. Not everything the Tennessee Journalist creates will be a hit. Some of it will surely fail, but at least they are trying something new.

I guarantee that a publication without an institutional memory will have a better chance of getting things right on the Web and creating some real gems. And a publication like the Tennessee Journalist (founded in 2006) will prepare students much better for the reality of 21st-century journalism.

One only has to compare the differences between the Tennessee Journalist’s Web site (built using Django, so you know the site has a modern CMS that rocks) to the archaic after thought known as the The Daily Beacon’s Web site (the independent student newspaper at the University of Tennessee).

At the end of the day it won’t matter how much news companies invest in new media or make fancy new features if those companies can’t get basic journalism right.

Credibility is at the heart of what we do. Every Jayson Blair sets us all back. That self-inflicted wound really hurt the credibility of The New York Times, and without credibility what does a newspaper really have?

Anyone can print words or run TV spots, but without getting the facts right, it’s not journalism. So, as much as all of us have been fawning over the new Las Vegas Sun redesign, it’s quite saddening to see the monster correction they had on a recent story about a shooting in an affluent suburb. The correction weighs in at more than 500 words.

That’s longer than many stories are to begin with. In fact, the correction is so long and the errors so egregious that I wonder why they just didn’t run a correction stating what they got right. Surely, it would have been shorter.

The story, by the way, is a little less than 1,500 words. That’s not a very good story-to-correction ratio.

This all comes on the heels of the horribly reported and factually challenged story by the Times about John McCain. Newspaper journalists should probably lay off complaining about bloggers for awhile. I’m just saying.