Is There Anybody Out There?- Blogging to Cyberspace

For years, The Torch promised to join the 21st century.

It was using software so antiquated that the publisher had to dig up an old template from the first Bush administration to have the paper published. Even high school yearbooks with the most minimal of budgets were even using software that was more updated and more user-friendly.

But thanks to the hard work of a group of dedicated people as well as a tidy grant from the university, The Torch finally updated getting the most advanced and the best software for laying out pages, editing photos and creating art for itself. The problem was...we were already getting put behind the ball once again.

Having a solid, and I'll grant you sometimes glorious, print edition is good, but we needed to move into a different realm. We needed to move online. Well...we've begun to move online. With a web edition of the paper now available the nonstop media machine is able to access the Torch in its best ways and comment instantly rather than the arduous task of writing a letter to the editor. Hell, the way the Torch has been run this year, sometimes you don't get a letter in the letter because somebody may not like what you have to say.

But this insurgence of online press has begun to move into our journalism classes as well. This semester, as evidence by what you're reading, the Advanced News Writing class was required to keep a regular blog about what was going on in their beat...Wittenberg University. We were to give comment and do some makeshift reporting in this new and odd world of commentary news that still upheld the principles of good writing we come to know, respect, and expect.

Some of us have covered our spring break vacations, our brand new Twitter accounts, or even trying to smile more. (Yeah Shelly!) But we've also covered more serious topics such as a continually bigoted campus, drug use, and most recently the death of Osama bin Laden. Was it successful? Did it achieve its goals?

In many ways, I think it did. Forcing our writer brains outside of their safe and happy homes, forced some interesting and never boring results. The problem was consistency. Early on, we were fired up about the blogs writing about the dirty things like drugs and racism. And since we were excited about it, we discussed it in class. There was heated debate that may not have ended with resolution but at least with a better understanding of the views of your fellow classmates.

But then life and other work began to encroach. We got busier, forgot about the blogs, and they became for some, a burden rather than the exciting new potential they could have been. I wish we would have discussed them more, gotten into conversations about things that move beyond the Witt Bubble. Expanding our conversation about what's going on campus is important, but moving beyond that to discuss the world, it's issues, and how to cover them as journalists is important as well.

We as students should have been more intent on reading our classmates work. If we were, we would have moved more quickly to discussing them. Instead, after twenty minutes, some of us tried to get out of class and ignore the obvious things left to work on.

I can't wait to continue to blog about the things I care about, the things I wish more would notice, and things I feel an imperative to bring attention to.

Happy blogging everyone, and Mac definitely keep requiring it.