Notes from the Desk: Charting a new course for Middlebury journalism

Student journalism has never been more central to the future of news media. At a time when traditional industry titans are being challenged for control over the information landscape, it’s college reporters who are writing the next chapter of media history. To have helped pen a paragraph or two of that history has been an exciting and humbling experience. Today, I’m proud to give a new set of driven, talented students the opportunity to make their own mark.

As the latest editor-in-chief of Middlebury College’s oldest news organization, I’ve been unusually fortunate. For one thing, I had at my back an exceptional lineup of veteran section editors that brought together nearly 40 years of combined experience. Armed with new design software and production equipment, the editors took it upon themselves to announce a campus-wide photo contest, launch a semi-weekly crossword puzzle, publish content on emerging platforms like Twitter and spark a public debate with Vermont health officials over the legal drinking age. In many ways, this team led itself.

On top of a remarkably deep roster, I was bestowed with a rare chance to make lasting changes at The Campus. Taking the reins as a junior rather than as a senior offered me the latitude to redefine The Campus’s relationship with the Web. The change had been long in coming, and not everybody was immediately on board with it. But having 17 months instead of the usual 11 made all the difference when it came to showing just how much it matters to a college newspaper like ours to be embracing the Internet.

First, there was the website. The last time we made significant changes to our digital strategy was back in 2001, when our previous site went live. By 2008, it was clear that our visually flat, text-heavy interface wasn’t going to attract the kind of readership we were looking for in the 21st century. What we needed was a more agile and assertive Web presence — one that we controlled from end to end. So we abandoned our cookie-cutter site, which until then had been run by an MTV subsidiary, and built one from scratch. It took two tries and countless discussions about our organization’s future, but we think what you see now when you visit middleburycampus.com is much better suited to Middlebury’s unique identity.

Then there was the issue of culture. Although our mission will always be to protect and defend the student voice, the reality is that our publication draws in a wide range of readers, including faculty, staff, administrators, parents, alumni, donors, trustees, prospective families and other observers of American higher education. Twelve percent of our online readership logs on from outside the United States. While the common temptation is to regard The Campus as a small-time publication with limited reach, our reporting often transcends the local boundaries we, as students, assume ourselves to be working within.

To avoid losing touch with that broader audience, we needed a Web presence that could keep up. And that meant changing the way The Campus itself interacted with the Internet. It meant, among other things, adopting Facebook and Twitter as legitimate reporting tools. It meant taking on video and audio production. It meant setting up a new section of the newspaper devoted to producing Web content. It meant figuring out how the Web could best serve readers so they’d keep coming back.

With no formal journalism program at Middlebury, this was easier said than done. But we’ve made great strides in the past 17 months, with more to come. Under the steady leadership of Lea Calderon-Guthe ’11 and Jaime Fuller ’11, The Campus will be picking up in the fall by making further improvements to the website, doing more with multimedia and posting content every several days instead of once a week. It’s an ambitious plan, but now is the best time to build on the foundations we’ve laid over the past year-and-a-half. I’m proud to have helped create a new future for this publication, and to be passing the torch to a team that believes in that future as fervently as I do couldn’t make me any happier.