College papers beat pros online with Web editions

CHEYENNE – Two years ago this spring, Rosalind Schliske was driving a vanload of Laramie County Community College journalism students back from a conference in Denver on newspapers on the Internet when the students exclaimed, “we want to go online.”The LCCC journalism instructor and multimedia coordinator’s first reaction was panic, but instead she gulped and said, “You bet, sure. When we get home, I’ll try to find somebody that knows how to do this.”
That somebody turned out to be Schliske and her students. Two months later, Wingspan, the student newspaper of LCCC, became one of the first student newspapers in the country to go online and only the second newspaper online in Wyoming.
“I was too stupid to know what I was getting into, but the students were fearless, absolutely fearless, and I couldn’t say no to them,” Schliske recalled. “It was like those old Mickey Rooney movies where they’d say, ‘Hey gang, let’s put on a show.’ We just did it.”
For both instructor and students, going online has been a shared learning experience.
“Sometimes as teachers we just have to get out of the way and let the learning happen,” she explained. “I learned many years ago that I can’t know everything. So what I do is create a learning environment. I don’t know everything online, but I create the situation where we have peer learners and peer teachers, and everyone’s learning from each other.”
The result is that LCCC has two student newspapers – the traditional printed version that now comes out once a month and the online version, which changes daily as news develops.
“The president (LCCC president Charles Bohlen) says the printed version of our student newspaper is simply a snapshot,” Schliske said. “It says at one moment in time, this is what it looked like, but the living, breathing dynamic growing entity is really Wingspan Online. So I like to say, ‘Is it live or is it Memorex?’ I don’t know which is the real paper anymore.”
By going online, up to 20 LCCC journalism students a semester learn to merge traditional print journalism skills with multimedia skills and the digital world of modern telecommunications, computer technology and the Internet. They experience the deadlines of daily journalism and learn how to update and revise stories continuously.
But to the students, the chief advantages are the “adrenaline rush and the instant gratification” of seeing their work online, not to mention the potential wide audience off the LCCC campus.
“The students are truly thinking multimedia, and they don’t think this is weird,” she added. “A lot of CEOs still think information is numbers and words, but we’re preparing students to change the definition of information. Information is not just numbers and words – it’s sound, it’s video, it’s pictures, it’s animations, it’s color, a whole lot of other things. Our students are going to pull those CEOs into this world.”
One reason Wingspan beat so many other student publications online is that it is an integral part of the journalism curriculum – students are required to work on it two of their four semesters. Another reason is the close cooperation with students in multimedia and broadcast programs at the school, and a third is that Schliske’s department has the newest, fastest, most powerful computers for desktop publishing and multimedia instruction.
Many student newspapers, she noted, are autonomous from their school’s journalism department, and that can make getting online an expensive proposition. “Once you have the computers, the cost is negligible,” she said.
Student newspapers at Colorado State University, the University of Northern Colorado and the University of Wyoming also are online.
After that first gulp, Schliske has become a firm believer in the value of having newspapers online and is proud of their quality.
“I get a little perturbed at people thinking anybody can go online,” she said. “I’ve been teaching people to communicate, and we look at sites that are being done by newspapers, and the graphics are better and the headlines are better – well, that’s what we practice. The concepts (of good journalism) aren’t changing, the medium is changing.”
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