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.]
Michael Koretzky, an adviser to Florida Atlantic University Press, in one of the most frustrating reads I have encountered in some time.
The question at the heart of the piece: Why are college websites so boring when their print versions are not? He concludes that print speaks to college students’ vanity: “Everyone has a Facebook page. But not everyone has a newspaper page.” Blech!
Sound familiar? It’s scary to think that college students are falling into the same trap of their older counterparts. It’s even more scary to think that the best student journalists in the nation are being driven not by the desire to expand their craft, but by a desire to see their name in print. The students, who inherit their newspapers 4 years at a time, are as subject to the forces of inertia and tradition as their older peers.
I’m not going to argue that Mr. Koretzky’s number 1 priority shouldn’t be to teach these students to be competent reporters, but a close second should be to demonstrate that the medium is changing. It’s imperative that they consider the means by which their stories are distributed.
“Whenever I meet new recruits at our student newspaper,” Mr. Koretzky writes, “I ask them, ‘What do you wanna be when you grow up?’ The answers almost always involve traditional print or broadcast: editor of Elle, music reviewer for Rolling Stone, investigative reporter for The New York Times, anchor for CNN, foreign correspondent for NPR. I never hear, ‘Content producer for a cutting-edge multimedia website’”
Mr. Koretzky’s job is to teach his students that in the future those will be the same thing.
