College students choose print over online. This is bad for college journalists
I do believe that it’s a matter of convenience and, to a degree, exclusivity—anyone can publish online, not everyone can publish a paper and have it distributed on every street corner of campus. But the one reason this article does not raise is this: Could it be that these university papers have yet to give students a compelling reason to read their online versions? Anecdotal evidence and my own experience suggests that university papers have been slow to adopt new technologies and invest in their online versions, let alone train their staff to think about and build interesting, unique news websites. Sound familiar? There’s a legacy issue here. There’s an inertia here that is not disrupted, as this article makes clear, by the ad declines of city newspapers. The business of printing college newspapers is good. This is problematic when it means college journalists are not being prepared for the challenges of working at a modern newspaper.
[Thanks for the link, Newzed.]
