Journalism has changed in two major ways since I began working for Indiana State University’s student-run newspaper my freshman year of college in 1999. When I started as a photojournalist, everything was shot with black and white film and developed in the dark room. Half an hour later, we were at the lightbox with a magnifying glass circling photos that needed to be scanned in. Add a few more minutes to complete that process and we were finally editing a picture using an early version of Photoshop.
While I occasionally miss the chemical smell or solitude of developing film, the creation of digital cameras drastically improved the lives of photographers. Now we can instantly see what we take photos of to ensure we get “the shot” and complete assignments can be downloaded, edited and have captions written in the time it used to take to develop film and scan a photo.
The other major change has been the importance of presenting news online and through social media. Now, I’m not old enough to say we didn’t have the Internet when I started as a journalist, but there was no Facebook, Twitter or MySpace. We had AOL and MSN instant messenger and that was all. Heck, texting wasn’t popular until later in college.
As managing editor, I try to place as much news – and faces – in each edition as possible. However, sometimes the amount of news outweighs the amount of space available. Luckily, the space online is unlimited, so I’m using that to place more stories, photos and news.
If you have a Facebook account, I encourage you to “like” us or at least check out our page at currentinnoblesville. I’ve started to boast our online photo galleries, so there are tons of pictures online that didn’t have space to appear in the newspaper – maybe even one of you!
It’s new to me, but I’ve been trying to use Twitter to the best of my ability. Now I promise you won’t read that I’m grabbing food at a certain restaurant or chilling at so-and-so (I hate reading those because no one cares), but I will make community updates, like when the first summer concert was rained out. You can follow me at @CI_Noblesville.
Photos and breaking news can also be found at www.currentinnoblesville.com. There you can find the current and archive editions of the paper, photo galleries and stories and vote on the online poll.
So there are three options to keep in touch with our community news, and as always, I encourage readers to let me know of news and events to include in print – and online.