College newspaper to undergo largest change in publication history
By J.T. Buchheit
Enjoy that newspaper you’re holding, because there won’t be nearly as many next year. The Campus Ledger is shifting its focus from paper to digital media in the coming semester, posting most of its articles online rather than in print.
“The primary reason this is happening is that this is a trend that many student publications are following, the trend of going digital first,” said Campus Ledger adviser Corbin Crable. … “So Campus Ledger employees are going to be posting primarily news to our website and saving some feature stories for the print edition, which will now be published the first Thursday of every month.”
Another reason for this change was due to school-wide budget cuts, making it much harder to churn out an issue every other week without significant financial repercussions.
“We knew this was going to happen,” said Crable. “We’re lucky to have very supportive administrators that we work for, so to me, this is going to be a pretty easy transition, knowing how familiar and comfortable these employees are with digital media.”
Not everybody is as optimistic as Crable that it will be a smooth transition, however. Some believe that there will be some bumps in the road along the way.
“I think the first semester we do it, there will be some obstacles,” said Editor-in-Chief Mike Abell. “Adjusting to deadlines, setting deadlines for people. It’s going to be kind of tricky the first semester, but I think once we get over that, we’ll be able to run things a lot more efficiently.”
Although budget cuts were one of the reasons the news will now be primarily digital, there are certainly some benefits to shifting to online news.
“We can always have a constant news flow,” said Abell. “Instead of uploading the whole issue that we do every two weeks and having all of the stories hit the website all at once, we can always have a flow of new content coming in.”
Although Crable is confident in the staff’s ability to adapt to the changes, he feels it may be bit harder getting the readers to get used to them as well.
“We’re going to be going from printing twice a month to once a month, and that’s probably going to be the biggest change we’re going to have to adapt to,” said Crable. “So it will be very important in the next few months that we market this change aggressively.”
One of the people on the staff in charge of getting the word out for this change is Managing Editor Valerie Velikaya.
“We’ll be putting up posters around campus, created by our very own, while advertising our website in our publication,” said Velikaya. “Mike, the designers and myself are still deciding on our approach.”
Although the actual content will require little change going from paper to online, there will need to be some modifications to the design aspect of it.
“We’re hoping to modernize it a bit and make it more appealing to the eye,” said Velikaya. “Our design is good, but not great. I’d like to clean it up a bit and make it easier for users to navigate.”
This major shift to digital will take some time in getting used to for both staff members and readers alike, but the digital age is upon us, and the Campus Ledger will make that vital transition.
To see video interviews with the Campus Ledger staff, click on the following link >>>