I came on board as the public editor of The Cavalier Daily at the same time that the then-daily print paper shifted to a digital first format. The staff changed from daily to twice a week print in a tabloid format, developed new mobile apps and redesigned the web page. The move was necessary, in part, because the financial realities facing The Cavalier Daily were stark, and the change saved a lot of money. Borne of that necessity was an opportunity to stake a claim in the future of journalism, especially collegiate journalism. The ability to publish information not just the next morning but constantly, on a range of devices and on multiple platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram also requires different, or perhaps more, foci.
The shift to digital-first news is becoming common for college dailies including The Daily O’Collegian at Oklahoma State and The College Reporter at Franklin & Marshall College. The former reinvented itself entirely as a new website with 3 print issues per week while the latter chose to continue laying out as though for print and upload a PDF file to their website instead of printing. Mt. San Antonio College, a community college outside of Los Angeles, has also dropped print entirely and is now publishing as Substance on Medium. To oversimplify, Medium is a publishing platform, a set of composing tools and an active network of writers and readers. It is a really interesting way to conceive of a college publication. Medium is supporting the efforts of Substance with, according to the professor who advises the newsmagazine, a full-time tech support person and access to their brain trust for ideas.
The point is that the publishing landscape for college journalism is changing. Further, the advertising landscape is changing. In order to continue, The Cavalier Daily will need to be able to make money in digital advertising. Remember, the organization is entirely independent from the University; they don’t get any funding and they have to earn their entire operating budget from selling ads. (It’s worth noting here: this makes The Cavalier Daily unique, as many student-run papers are offshoots of journalism programs and at least partially funded by their schools.)
The digital push has to succeed. The Cavalier Daily, though, hasn’t yet found its footing in the digital space. The staff maintains many Twitter feeds, with 11,500 followers on the main account and a Facebook page with only 2,800 likes, which seems low, and there is probably some sort of Facebook vs. Twitter lesson here. Both of these, though, largely push out articles from the main paper portion of The Cavalier Daily. Those articles, most of the time, read just like they read more than a year ago when the paper was printed 5 days a week. I still don’t see any significant changes to how the information flow works to take advantage of and meet the expectations for digital publishing. The iOS app, for example, is clunky and, frankly, unattractive after the home page. It is not intuitive and the layout doesn’t work well on smaller screens because there is no landscape mode and there isn’t a way to resize the text.
The main website for The Cavalier Daily is still frustrating to use. It remains difficult to efficiently find even recent older articles and columns. That is — if something is brand new it’s fairly easy to locate, but if you browse looking for an Opinion column from longer than about 2 weeks ago you’re out of luck. Some things never change, like the editorial cartoon from February of this year that is still up. The problem, it seems to me, is that the website is basically an electronic newspaper instead of a dynamic platform onto which all kinds of information and content could be loaded.
Over the past year, The Cavalier Daily has often been at its best with breaking stories and especially with live sports coverage. Using Twitter effectively to disseminate information and collecting new information regularly into longer stories for the website works well. I’d like to see more information about when and how updates are made to stories (that is, the rules The Cavalier Daily has for itself) so readers can understand changes especially in breaking news stories. In the ongoing story of Hannah Graham’s disappearance The Cavalier Daily has done a good job of getting information out; that’s important not only as a news story but because the public can and is assisting in trying to find her.
The Cavalier Daily is an important piece of the University and Charlottesville communities. I think the paper, though, is still a paper and it needs to change into more.
Christopher Broom is the public editor for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at publiceditor@cavalierdaily.com, or on Twitter at @cdpubliceditor.
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