"The Post" celebrates past and future with the #InnovationIssue and a heart for change.
It used to be that parents, friends and classmates would warn anxious, young journalists with a sympathetic tone that their field was — gasp! — changing.
It also used to be that student journalists would respond solemnly, their heads hung low.
Yes, journalism is changing. Yes, there’s not much we can do to stop it. Quite a shame, isn’t it?
Not really. Change is a fantastic concept. The nature of our society always has been one of periodic and sizable change, and the world I was born into (and my parents were born into) is vastly different now than I ever could have pictured it. Journalism is an entirely different beast worth tackling than when I first thought I may want to be a reporter — newspapers are fewer, but readers are everywhere. The Post is an example of a relevant media outlet that’s read by thousands of so-called millennials every day.
To be fair, The Post is a century-old institution. That’s part of the reason I wanted to work for it, and I’m not going to try and deny the intangible feeling of flipping through our decades-old archives. It’s worth understanding where we’ve come from, and it’s the only way to predict why change is worthwhile in the first place.
When the student newspaper at Ohio University was first published as The Post in 1939, its editors showed off their super-modern thrice-weekly newspaper. The front page featured several stories that were fewer than 200 words, mostly about student and campus life. Editors argued that young people simply wanted to read about people like themselves and that they wanted to do so in the time it took to walk to class.
Sound familiar?
The Post’s primary objective then — and today — was to find readers wherever they may be and tell the news however they may want it.
That’s why we’re redesigning our print product to be a once-weekly tabloid, focused primarily on breaking down complex topics and profiling students’ lives. Our website will change to be better read on a cellphone. Our reporters will focus on the curious going-ons that draw a reader to a news website and the important journalism that has made an impact on and off our campus. We’ll find a happy medium in shaking up our notion of journalism, so long as we still get to practice it.
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The students featured in this “Innovation Issue” are those who tried an off-the-wall idea and made it work, or those who found new ways to make themselves heard. They’re people that have forged new paths, found quirky ways to make a few bucks or learned more about the world around them by innovating. They’re the “cool kids.”
Editors at The Post would like to take the upcoming transition as an opportunity to rethink the news, its readers and their perception of journalism.
That challenge will mean more to us than a seat at the “cool kids” table — it will put The Post back on students’ radars as the media outlet that's made for them, by people just like them.
Emma Ockerman is a junior studying journalism and editor-in-chief of The Post. Want to talk to her about innovation? Email her at eo300813@ohio.edu or tweet her @eockerman.
