4-26-09: The never-ending deadline

By far the biggest change to the workings of The DePauw this semester has been the staff's newfound focus on online content. We've got video and audio clips, photo slideshows and stories and columns that you won't find in the newspaper. At the start of the semester, we weren't even posting photos with our stories; it was pretty much all text.Whatever back-patting the staff can indulge in though, there's so much more we can do in the future. Two recent events on campus - Little 5 and the board of trustees meetings - have provided test cases for thedepauw.com's potential, as well as the challenges that will come from a never-ending deadline.

As the Little 5 street sprints were taking place a couple Fridays ago, professor Kent Menzel was recording the official results. The DePauw's sports editor, Tyler James, was on-hand with his laptop, getting the results from Menzel as soon as they were complete. With a few mouse clicks, Tyler posted the results on our Web site, and Menzel was telling the crowds at the street sprints that they could find the results at thedepauw.com.

That's an editor in chief's dream come true, folks.

Even cooler, because of the inclusion of multimedia, was the breaking news on DePauw's budget that appeared on thedepauw.com around 6 p.m. this Friday. The board of trustees' spring meetings had ended Friday afternoon, and President Casey and board Chairman R. David Hoover held a conference with the student media at 3:30 that day to discuss the highlights - a gracious opportunity the board has provided to the student media every year that I've been here.

In past years The DePauw has treated this conference as fodder for a story in the following Tuesday's issue, but I wanted to see if we could use the Web site to bring the event closer to our audience. I took my laptop and recorded the entire conference beginning at 3:30, headed back to the newsroom when it ended at 4, and within two hours had edited and posted the recording online.

Thanks to The DePauw e-mail alerts (which you can sign up for under "Register" on the left side of the page) the audio of the media conference wasn't just sitting on the site for people to stumble across; I was able to alert our registered online followers that breaking news was available for them to hear.

After posting the audio around 6 p.m., I started writing a story on the budget announcement and other trustee activities, and got that posted around 8 p.m.

The conference went from a small room in the Union Building to the ears and eyes of DePauw news junkies in four hours. Given the costliness of setting up to broadcast the media conference on TV or radio, that's as close to live as we can get for the time being.

The obvious difficulty with the never-ending deadline is that it makes it harder to coordinate the editing process. When the reporter, section editor, copy editor, managing editor and editor in chief are all in a room together, it's pretty easy to move a story through the editing process in a couple hours. But when the reporter is on the scene with a laptop while the copy editor is potentially off-campus and the tired editor in chief is sleeping (ha!), things get tougher.

The answer I hope The DePauw shuns in the future is simply letting things go online without editing. But I confess that in both the cases mentioned above - Little 5 and the trustee media conference - that's exactly what happened.

The DePauw owes its online audience the same attention to accuracy that our print readers get, and accomplishing that is something the staff will still be working on well after I graduate in a few weeks.

There may be bumps along the way, but the goal is that news about this small university in Greencastle, Ind. will no longer be published on Tuesdays and Fridays, but will be available online as events happen.

Consider it an adventure, and you're along for the ride.