My editor promoted me to staff writer from “campus correspondent” at a news meeting this week. As I walked back to the dorm, I realized how much this new title meant to me. Sure, staff writers are higher up on the payscale. Sure, staff writers get first pick on the stores before the campus correspondent’s fight over the cool stories with piranha-like fury. Okay – I exaggerated. Slightly. But the fact is that I now really feel a part of the paper and my campus. At the beginning of the semester, I remember walking into the meetings right on-time and standing by the door to wait and get my assignment. Now I walk in early, grab a seat and try to separate the real stories from the joke ones on the board. And, of course, crack some one-liners. Maybe lots of them.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the differences between writing for The Beak back in high school and The Daily Campus in college. I guess the audience for the remainder of this post is current high school journalists wondering what it’s like to write for a college publication or college students who wrote for their high school papers and are thinking about writing for their college papers. The following comparisons involve my collegeand my high school. The college part of the comparison may be similar to other large universities. Here is what I’ve learned so far:
*Frequency: college paper is printed daily during the school week; high school paper was produced once a month
*Deadlines: college papers have deadlines for hard news. This week I had to write a story in 30 minutes at 11 o’clock at night after attending a very interesting two hour forum; in high school, I had weeks to research and write a story
*The People: sources for your story could be noted professors or a random person that you meet in the student union who you have never seen before and may never see again; in high school, I knew just about anyone there was to interview
*Editorial Independence: the college paper is independent from the university, a $7 per semester fee from students taken by the university partially funds the paper. Student copywriters edit the articles; in high school, an advisor who is a teacher ultimately edited my articles
*Exposure: The college paper has a circulation of around 10,000. Its website is managed by MTV and its articles are syndicated onto other college paper websites run by MTV. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, Google News will pick up my byline; what I wrote for my high school paper pretty much stayed there
Yet my high school paper gave and my college paper gives me many opportunities to meet new people and ask questions. Many questions.
And here’s one question for you: if you write for a campus newspaper, what is your newspaper like? If you wrote for a campus paper, what are you memories of writing for one?
