Priorities

[Kath Sullivan]

If you could start from scratch, knowing what you know about newsrooms today and The Chronicle you grew up in, what kind of newsroom would you design for the paper? What would be the most important features?

[Shannon Mullen]

As a decidedly uni-media journalist who is beginning to come to terms with multi-media platforms, I definitely feel The Chronicle newsroom should be structured with video capabilities in mind. My own paper has made modest progress in this area of late, but one of our sister papers in the Gannett chain, The Journal News of NY's lower Hudson Valley of upstate NY (www.lohud.com) is way ahead of the curve, having teamed with a local cable TV news outlet to produce an online newscast and other features that are generating significant Web traffic, if not huge profits. LoHud.com also has its own music studio where local artists perform - a big undertaking for a college newspaper, obviously, but perhaps worth exploring. The old workstation/cubicle tradition endures, but needn't at a forward-thinking college paper, which ought to focus on mobility and flexibility - meaning laptops, PDAs, point-and-shoot cameras, etc. and being able to file photos, stories and breaking news updates remotely. At our paper, we're being told to think in terms of working for the Web site first, and the printed paper second - a mindset that has prompted some physical layout changes, including a daytime news desk whose primary purpose is to get breaking news updates up on the Web asap.

[Therese Maher Pfeifer]

I know all the input at this site is made with the absolute best of intentions. We have to be very careful not to over step our welcome. The biggest value of The Chronicle experience is that the student staff owns the process. In my Chronicle days, I certainly wouldn't have wanted some old fart like me telling me how things should be. The Chronicle was in capable hands when I was a student. The staffs before and since have successfully navigated big changes. The Chronicle is in capable hands now.