It’s not news to anyone that the newspaper business is undergoing a revolution. Gone are the simple days when you picked up The New York Times in the morning to see what the headlines would be. Now, I read more than half the articles in the morning paper on the Internet the night before. The newspaper industry has gone Web-first.

As a result, reporters entering the industry are expected to have a much wider range of skills than before. Being a great reporter is no longer enough if you don’t know how to work your way around video, blogs, online interactive content and the like. And it’s the job of student newspapers and their editors to prepare students for this highly competitive job market.

I just spent all of last week at a conference in Georgia with over 60 newspaper editors from around the country. And let me tell you, we take this job very seriously. We are also well aware of the task ahead of us.

For a college paper, the print edition is still what students turn to most – sure, some days it might just be for the Sudoku, but we like to believe that you’ll at least glance at the headlines on the front page before turning to page 12. As a result, few college papers post regular news online throughout the day. I’m not sure I see this changing across college papers anytime soon.

Nevertheless, all eyes in the industry and around the country are on the Web. Though the print product is still a college newspaper’s most important way of reaching students, our Web sites are now allowing us to bring new features to our readers like audio, video and interactives. They also allow us to publish more articles and thus cover more of our campuses. And our Web sites are now the place to look when breaking news of any kind unfolds on campus.

But student papers have to take it a step further. In our conversations last week, Sara Gregory, my counterpart at The Daily Tar Heel, emphasized the importance of remaining “a teaching paper” at all times. And just last Friday, Julia Wallace, the editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, shared with us the hardships for newspapers in today’s media market. For the first time in her career, she’s struggling with the difficult task of having to lay off staff.

The market is tough and we have a responsibility to help Penn students interested in journalism survive in it. It is for this reason that college papers must take larger strides in multimedia innovation. And almost every editor that walked away from this week’s conference now has this task in the forefront of his/her mind.

Here at the DP, we’ve been working (and continue to work) to serve our reader with a better Web site, interactive features, videos and galleries. But we, like many papers, strive to do more. We want to teach our staffers to become 21^st century journalists.

It’s no secret that there’s much uncertainty in the industry these days. No one can predict where college newspapers will be in a few years. But after spending a week talking with other editors, I do know that college newspapers will be upping their Web presence. Over the next year, we will all be rolling out major changes online to help bring our reporters the skills they now need.

I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to be college newspaper editor.

Tags: conference, journalism, MSCNE, multimedia, Web

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Managing Editor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.