Tynan's Anger

NYU's campus, via WikipediaAlana Taylor's up to no good again at the PBS MediaShift Blog (in a good way). Alana focuses on the rise of NYU Local and the threat it poses to the more traditional print NYU paper, the Washington Square News. In Alana's mind, the WSN has lagged behind in its online presence, and has failed by staying dependent on its print edition. She wants to see more NYU Local's and less WSN's in the future.

Alana's perspective works for NYU, but it runs into problems when you try to expand the argument to other colleges. As the title on MediaShift points out (but the article itself doesn't really mention), NYU has no campus; it's decentralized, sprawling nature essentially makes all of lower Manhattan its campus. For that kind of scattered environment, a print newspaper would be hard to get to the right people. For NYU, an online newspaper like NYU Local makes sense.

Most colleges, however, are not like NYU. They have a rather small, centralized campus, a campus which most students either live on or near. When I was an editor at the Chicago Maroon at the University of Chicago, our core readership even among college students in 2007 was students who picked up the paper in the dining hall, the student center, or the dorms. In fact, at the American Journalism Review, Philip Meyer noted that the only way newspapers can stay dominant in the future is with a strong local presence and community influence. There's very few places where that can apply more than on a small college campus. On a side note, the Maroon has vastly improved its website since I left the paper. But while that will certainly increase its presence in the city of Chicago and in online media, it's influence on campus is still dominated by the print edition.

So in sum, Alana's call for more of an online presence for college newspapers only really works with a college with a sprawling, decentralized space with a large commuter presence. For a more traditional college, print will continue to dominate for the time being.

Labels: alana taylor, chicago maroon, college newspaper, New York University, Newspaper, NYU Local, university of chicago, Washington Square News