The Daily Pennsylvanian has finished regular daily publication for the semester. With the exception of the traditional finals issue coming out next week, we won’t be back until classes resume in January.

On behalf of The Spin and The Daily Pensylvanian, I would like to thank you, our readers, for visiting The Spin on a regular basis.

In case you didn’t know, I’ve been in charge of The Spin for the past semester. I will be leaving my position as Deputy Editorial Page Editor along with my boss and Editorial Page Editor, Evan Goldin.

It’s been a thrill to work with so many great columnists and dive into a new, online-exclusive format for DP opinion writing.

The dedicated online columnists, or “columnistas,” as I like to call them, have spent a great deal of time and effort creating content for The Spin. We hope that we have provided you, our readers, with a worthwhile online experience that makes you feel more connected to Penn, The Daily Pennsylvanian and general college life.

As The Spin has developed over the past few months, our approach has been to push the boundaries of traditional Web logs, or “blogs”. In particular, The Spin has featured a good deal of original reporting. Unlike most blogs, much of the content of The Spin is collected with the same standards for reporting as any news item in the DP.

While this approach is unorthodox for blogs, we believe that print media must integrate original reporting and the internet if the industry is to continue to grow. Our approach is gaining traction in the industry. For example, the popular left-wing political blog Huffington Post recently announced that they have hired a veteran print journalist to cover events in Washington, D.C. and produce more “original content.”

The new initiative of the Huffington Post sounds like it’s ripped from page-one of the Spin playbook. And, yes, there actually is a Spin playbook.

We expect to have a few posts up during the DP finals issue next week. Beginning in January, The Spin will feature a new editor and a new roster of columnistas.

If you are interested in joining The Spin next semester, please fill out our columnist application by December 31st. You can choose to apply as an online columnist, a print columnist or both. I encourage you to apply!

Once again, thank you for joining us this semester. I hope to see you back in January. If you have any questions or comments about the Spin, please feel free to e-mail them to me at Obenzinger@dailypennsylvanian.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.