From the days of brows­ing a bare-bones World Wide Web, where an occa­sional graphic was a treat, to our mod­ern fully-interactive, Flash and JavaScript media dri­ven web sites of today, a lot has changed.

To say the least, brows­ing the web has become quite a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. We’ve reached a day where we don’t think twice to pull out our cell­phones to look up a quick piece of infor­ma­tion. “Oh, I’ll just Google that,” or “let me check Wikipedia.” We can do this in the blink of an eye and a fin­ger tap of a screen.

But where does that put us, the col­lege news­pa­pers of today. Many of our papers are just now get­ting online. Oth­ers are just now join­ing the social media craze. But how many of us have mobile ver­sions of our web site? (more…)

When Wes Mau­rer gets asked what will save news­pa­pers, his sim­pli­fied response is good writ­ing and good journalism.

Mau­rer, the pub­lisher and edi­tor of the St. Ignace News in St. Ignace, Mich. and the Mack­inac Island Town Crier, rep­re­sents an old school style of news­pa­per jour­nal­ism that isn’t focused on tweets and web prowess, but more so the con­tent that fills the space between the reader’s thumbs as they hold the paper in front of their face. (more…)