College media going digital

I don't remember telling you what I do, so let me explain to you.

I'm a young journalist, reporter and editor for The Vista, our school newspaper at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Here are my responsibilities: 

I'm responsible for gathering information about upcoming events and addressing them to our staff reporters.
I'm responsible for writing a column for every issue, and a couple "blurbs" per week.
I'm responsible for editing the stories and posting them online.
I'm responsible for designing the layout paper that will get printed and distributed on campus.
I'm responsible to be a good journalist, follow my passion, and educate the community. 

Today while reading MulinBlog, I found an interesting article that might help young journalists starting their career. The article talks about college media becoming more modern, and adapting to the digital world. It's very interesting for me, because The Vista just decided to do an investment in our digital paper!

Let's take a better look of it.

The article explains that student newspapers were made for two main reasons: inform college students about what's happening locally, and train young professionals. 

"First of all, newspaper industry as a whole has been losing audiences and students are getting their news on mobile devices. In a recent article about the aging newspaper readership, the author observed that:

The population of people reading newspapers has aged dramatically in the last three years to the point that nearly three-quarters of the audience is aged 45 or older. …… only 6% of the newspaper audience is 18-24, even though this age group constitutes 10% of the population.

As to the second purpose, training future journalists, the “print first” or “print only” workflow at many student newspapers is no longer what people are doing in real newsrooms. Today’s media and marketing jobs require more than writing articles and taking photos," said Mu Lin, owner of MulinBlog.

However, "going digital" doesn't mean you won't ever print newspapers, or you will always post online first, or just post it online for that matter.

To make the paper digital, we need to combined three things: print, web, and mobile. It's all the three together with equally importance.

"The new philosophy and workflow also call for a new structure in news operations. I recommend an article by a TCU faculty adviser of student media, which reflects on their experience going digital in fall 2012. Among all the drastic changes, here’s what they did to streamline operations of several student media:

…… all of the content is produced through what has been dubbed “one big news team” with about 70 student journalists and is focused on content and delivering news digitally – and not based on legacy media needs.

 Each content area was organized into a team with a team leader who worked as both an editor and senior reporter," said Mu Lin.

With that being said, don't give up on print so easily. Combine all your journalistic strenghts and make it to another level. Be creative with your skills. We are all unique! 

Here's the link for the article: http://www.mulinblog.com/college-media-are-going-digital-first/.

Draft for Questions with Queila Column at The Vista.