Here's why I love college journalism

This past weekend, I was lucky enough to attend the Associated Collegiate Press Midwinter National College Journalism Conference in San Francisco, California. It was a somewhat stressful experience in that my co-editor and I were responsible for wrangling ten rowdy newspaper editors through the airport, onto the airplane, etc., but it was great. The whole staff learned a lot and are eager to implement changes.

The focus of the conference was "Media+," a theme that emphasizes social media and multimedia reporting in edition to print or digital reporting. Since The Pioneer Log is a print-first publication, I felt we had a lot to learn. While we do have a website and utilize Facebook and Twitter, our focus is mainly on our publication.

I am very proud of the front page of our March 1st issue!

While I do want to improve our online presence, we are still ironing out the kinks in our re-designed paper. A good suggestion we got from the conference to easily enhance our social media presence is to live tweet events. I think that this will work really well for sporting events, and maybe even next week's Gender Studies Symposium! As for Facebook, our Opinion section has started what they call "The Rhetorical Rampage" in which two people argue against each other on some topic. Readers are then encouraged to vote on Facebook for who won the debate.

Overall, the conference was a great opportunity for us to bond and learn about our craft. Since Lewis & Clark doesn't have any journalism classes, we really need conferences like this!

And it was amazing to see so many people just like me working hard at their newspapers. Even though "print is dead" and "anyone can be a journalist," there are many of us who are dedicated to learning everything we can about the field. It was inspiring to be around so many writers and editors. I love college journalism because none of us are jaded yet.

I hope that you notice changes to our paper, and give us feedback! We are your student newspaper!