Newspaper changes - Apr 30, 2015

Interesting post by a college student who wrote for the school's paper.

http://qz.com/394426/i-am-editor-of-my-college-newspaper-and-the-job-i-trained-for-no-longer-exists/

My peers are interested in reading news, but they have no loyalties whatsoever about where it comes from. You can be the greatest columnist in the world, but it will be tough to garner a strong following from millennials.

Even some of my closest friends refused to pick up the newspaper I spent dozens of hours on each week. They’d rather get the day’s news from many different sources by scrolling through their Twitter feed.

Second, millennials want reporters to clearly state why a story matters to them. This is the selfish side of millennials we hear so much about. But it’s a good idea for reporters to understand to keep readers engaged longer.

Local news is not dead. Rather, there’s a demand for hyper local news in real time, which is why Facebook pages like Overheard at UNC are incredibly popular. They’re a home for citizen journalists to curate and present content.

Finally, there is not a strong appreciation for opinion writing. My peers would rather be given the information and formulate an opinion on their own. They turn to their peers for help, not the local opinion editor.

That last paragraph expresses a long-standing viewpoint for me that reporters are important. Editors too, I guess. But I don't see the point of opinion writers, since the Internet is loaded with opinions.

The reporters can edit each others work, similar to code reviews among programmers. And maybe an official editor is still needed. Opinion writers or columnists are unnecessary.

As a caveat to that, the news industry’s efforts to keep opinion separate in the newsroom and in print is completely lost on readers close to my age. They don’t care if you have a special font that you only use for editorials. They can’t tell the difference. They don’t care if opinion is on the front page. That’s not how they organize the news in their mind.

And the big one. After many classes with some of the journalism school’s best minds, my classmates and I still couldn’t figure out a definitive way to make news profitable.

I will work in a place that has all the snarkiness and wit of a great newsroom that is struggling to understand how to turn a profit in a world where everyone believes information should be free.

Sidenote: I don't understand the usage of "upacked" :

• And I’m not sure we fully unpacked that.
• We unpacked so much and we were given the tools and the knowledge to tackle many other issues facing the journalism industry.

Is "unpacked" a new buzzword? What about "understood" or "learned"?

#media