Keeping Up With the Times
The Pitt News: A Transforming Platform
“The gray lady has gone through some changes, but she still exists,” Harry Kloman, advisor to The Pitt News, said.
Since its inception, the Internet has presented newspapers with the challenge of finding more creative methods of maintaining readers.
Paste-Up
“Everything used to be done by hand,” Terry Lucas, business manager of The Pitt News, said of the state of the paper the year he was hired — 1986.
At that time, photographs were still developed in dark rooms. Formatting each day’s paper involved printing out headlines and paragraphs, pasting them up onto boards, and walking them to a printer late at night.
Web Presence
The first online edition of the Pitt News was published in 1996, according to Lucas.
“Newspapers were posting their content online, so we figured, ‘Why not?’” Lucas said. It felt like the natural next step, even though the Internet was still a new commodity.
“It was this rinky-dink news site that no one knew about,” Harry Kloman, advisor to The Pitt News, said of the site’s humble beginnings.
Computers soon became capable of formatting each day’s paper as a complete document, and the paste-up system was eradicated. Today, the daily paper is simply sent to the printer via a PDF file, according to Harrison Kaminsky, managing editor at The Pitt News.
Blooming Platforms
Encouraged by advances in technology, The Pitt News has introduced multiple other “channels” of publication, Kaminsky said.
According to Lucas, The Pitt News began to incorporate multimedia video-recordings in their online editions, and launched a Twitter account in 2008.
The Pitt News’ Twitter account established its first real presence in the community in 2010, when it took on the riots that occurred in Oakland in response to that year’s G20 Summit.
“Our reporters were covering it — reporting it, via Twitter. We were breaking news as it was happening,” Lucas said.
The Pitt News launched a mobile app in 2013, according to Lucas.
“We wanted to have some sort of platform where our newspaper could be viewed on a mobile phone, or a smart phone,” Lucas said. The paper offers two other “channels” of content, through Facebook and Instagram, according to Kaminsky.
Concerning the Future
Despite the efforts the Pitt News has made, though, a proven decline in readership has occurred. Grotta Marketing Research found that, for the 2013–2014 schoolyear, seven out of ten Pitt students read the paper. That included all forms, not just print. Five years earlier, the same study found that nine out of ten students read the paper.
“I think college newspapers have to make sure they’re delivering the news in whatever platform the college students are using,” Lucas said. “I’d love to do Snapchat.”
“I would maintain that the internet has taken us back to our roots in journalism,” Kloman said. “When reporters got back from a story, they had to write- fast, fast, fast- because writing was just the tiny first step in a long process,” he said, referring to the hot metal typesetting process.
As printing methods improved, writers were able to stretch their legs a bit. They had more time to type up their drafts.
“Then came the internet, and we’re back to fast, fast, fast,” Kloman said.
“Readers want to know what’s going on as news is happening,” Lucas said. “News is immediate, now.”
Though the methods by which news is transferred are becoming increasingly demanding, the object of news remains the same.
“We ask questions of people who are newsworthy, and we report those answers. Newspapers deliver information. That’s that,” Kloman said.
