The water’s fine

The DTH opens its doors tomorrow to about 150 journalism babies. Recruitment is over, we oriented them Saturday and tomorrow many of them will be working on their very first stories/photographs/graphics/pages/etc. I expect lots of questions along the lines of “How do I dial out on the phone?” “Where do I type my article?” and “What’s my deadline?”

All of the editors, who have been putting out the paper these last four weeks with a bare-bones staff left over from last year, are incredibly excited about this batch of new staff. As inexperienced as they are, they are manpower. 

But all of the editors are a little scared too – everyone feels a great sense of responsibility to these new staff. Last year we hired 185 new staff (we hire everyone…), but by the end of the semester, less than half remained. The DTH isn’t for everyone, and there’s a weeding out process. But we also lose a lot of talented folks that we end up wishing hadn’t weeded themselves out.

We hired a news adviser for the first time this year. We’re behind a lot of our peer-newspapers in hiring an adviser, and part of what we feel Erica can help us with is with retention. She’ll be meeting with every single new staff member at least once this semester formally, and is going to serve as a writing coach/internship-search-resource/calm voice. 

Erica is going to really help where new staffers fall in the cracks. It’s not that desk editors don’t want to be a resource, but sometimes they don’t have the time or the experience themselves to really serve as a help. And hopefully Erica can help our editors be better editors. She’s there for us, too.

Here are my goals for helping new staff transition to the DTH:

• I’m going to learn their names. All 100 and however many of them there are. As a freshman, there was nothing more exciting for me than when management called me by my name. Or said hi to me when they saw me outside the newsroom.
• I’m going to be patient when answering even the most seemingly obvious of questions.
• I’m going to explain every change I make when editing. I think editing should be a conversation. My best editors have always edited that way, and as a reporter, I think you learn better by talking it out. And I think I edit better this way, too.
• I’m going to make a big deal to them of getting their stories in the paper, especially on front or page three. I cut out every single article I wrote freshman year and taped them to my dorm wall. Seeing your name in print is a really big deal.
• I’m going to find something positive to say about something in everything they do.

I’m taking an online journalism class this semester with Ryan Thornburg, a DTH alum who was in charge of the Iraq war and 2004 election coverage on washingtonpost.com.

One of our ongoing assignments is to blog about a specific topic related to the elections in N.C. My plans are to follow student newspapers, mainly college, and how they’re covering the campaigns:

But in an election season that already has charged the youth vote, college newspapers would be remiss if they didn’t cover the campaigns. Already, papers have sent student journalists around N.C. to cover politico’s appearances, have snagged interviews with candidates for state office and have localized the party’s conventions in Denver and St. Paul, Minn. And when it comes to state elections, student papers might be a reader’s only source of information about the candidates. How they cover the elections matter. (N.C. Youth Vote, Sept. 4)

I’m really hoping that following this will help with our own election coverage at the DTH. State & National Editor Ariel Zirulnick has so many ideas of what we can do and is blogging about the election for the paper, and our efforts are increasing daily as the election draws closer and closer.  I’m going to try for my class blog to be light on DTH news, mostly because I want to focus on what we can learn from what other papers are doing. I’m also particularly interested in how student papers are embracing technology to cover the election. At the MSCNE conference I went to this summer, papers outside of N.C. have big plans, and my fingers are crossed that we’ll see really innovative ideas here, too.

The first DTH of the year is online and in stands now. It’s a good feeling, looking at the 26-page behemoth knowing how hard all the staff worked last week to put it out and knowing all the hard work they’re still putting in for Tuesday’s 34-pager.

Right now I’m most excited about our recruitment efforts. We manned a booth at Fall Fest, the annual start-of-year celebration where student groups court new members, and have a recruitment page on the Web site, complete with a video about the DTH from our multimedia desk. Editor Alli Nichols is at the journalism school’s convocation right now, making her pitch for the DTH, and I just sent an e-mail to the hundreds who signed up for our listserv. We’ll meet with the first group of interested students this Thursday.

I’m interested in what other student newspapers are doing to recruit this fall. It was a big topic of discussion at the MSCNE conference I went to this summer, and we all brain-stormed ideas for how to best recruit. We’ll be going to various classes to make pitches, we’re holding interest meetings, promoting it heavily on the Web site, using informational e-mails and have even got a few recruits from Twitter. What else can we do?

Welcome to independence, Rocky Mountain Collegian!

After one of Student Media’s most tumultuous years, the CSU department became a private non-profit business called the Rocky Mountain Student Media Corporation on Aug. 1.

… The medias include the Collegian, TV station CTV, radio station KCSU and quarterly magazine College Avenue (“Student media officially separated from university“)

The Collegian of course, got in a little trouble last year after it published this editorial, which in turn prompted their advisory board to look at separating from the university, News Managing Editor Aaron Hedge writes, though not before talks to “partner” with Gannett’s local daily, The Fort Collins Coloradoan.

Best of luck to all the student media groups!

The last part of our day included a tour of UGA’s independent student paper, The Red and Black. I have a friend who used to be on the R&B and it’s one of the college papers I follow the most, because of the similarities between UNC, UGA and our two papers, but I’d never seen the office.

They own their own building, which is great, but of course presents its own challenges (taking care of maintenance work on your own, for example). It’s a pretty two story building that’s slightly off-campus at the top of a lovely hill. Their ad staff works on the first floor, and editorial staff is on the second floor. You can see the newsroom here.

What amazed me is how clean it was. At the DTH we have Halloween/Christmas/Valentine’s decorations from 2+ years ago that have never been taken down. This in addition to piles of papers (often trash) and general junk. Also, our well loved couch that has had oh so many sleep on it. Even just the individual decorations desks put up, whether it’s cutting out good articles and hanging them, or pictures of staff or whatever. The DTH feels very lived in, and there’s no mistaking it for a college newsroom. Still, I’m sure The Red and Black, when it isn’t the middle of the summer (when even the DTH looks lonely), is a much, much livelier place (is it even possible for a college newspaper to not be?).

The sad news of this endeavor was the disappointing news about College Publisher 5 from Ed Morales, the Red and Black’s editorial adviser. College Publisher 5 has basically been promised to us (and all the other college newspapers who host with them) as a sort of Web Jesus. It’ll post stuff for you! You can click and drag! It’s so flexible! It’s amazing.

Apparently not (No surprise – they also said we’d be switched over this summer … which is now this scheduled for the fall … which surely will be pushed back even later before it’s all over). But everyone was so excited about CP5 because really, there is a lot of room for improvement. From what he said, their experience testing it out, they found that it took almost 4 times as long to post because all of the automation has disappeared. The automatic posting apparently isn’t there yet.

Only one paper in the country, as I understand, is on CP5 now fully, and I’d really be interested in hearing their experiences. Most of the papers here are on CP, and as Morales pointed out, that’s really because there is no other good option now for college papers. Juliette Mullin, the Daily Pennsylvanian managing editor and I talked about this, and we’re both frustrated, but also don’t see switching away from CP as an option. The DP has talked about switching to Drupal, but her concern is continuity, and finding staff year to year that can maintain a site on their own without the system in place with CP. And as Andrew learned, learning Drupal isn’t easy either. The Savannah Morning News Editor, Susan Catron (a DTH alum!), said their paper has been hosting on Drupal and is very happy with it, but again, I don’t see our staff now having the skills to build and maintain our own site. And hosting on WordPress, as some papers do with great success, isn’t practical for a paper like us in the event we get huge traffic one day (Taheri-azar, Eve Carson, etc).

So for anyone who’s working with it now, how’s CP5? Is it as bad/good as we’ve heard? Can it walk on water, or does it sink?