A few days before the Herald staff started work on the issue you’re reading now, Madison’s community of journalists was hit by another shockwave from the constant implosions within journalism itself. The Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times announced they would be eliminating 15 jobs from their newsrooms, making an already slim newspaper staff even smaller. Couple this with the failure of prominent newspapers in Denver and Seattle and the bankruptcy of Chicago’s two main newspapers, one has to ask: Why do students still go to school for journalism? Why bother going into debt for a low-paying job? Why work at The Badger Herald?

I think of our paper as an ongoing experiment. Journalists will remain journalists, but the medium is changing rapidly.

Or at least it should be. Many in the print industry seem resistant to discarding the old ways of journalism and therefore find themselves holding onto a sliver of their masthead while bloggers, PR officials and aggregators try to make off with the rest of their work. And sometimes, they succeed. And maybe that’s the way it has to be.

But at a college newspaper, we have a little more leeway. We’re in the same economy as everyone else, but the radical ideas and new ways of presenting information are fostered here first, in the university community. And for that reason, we have a unique ability to encourage the evolution of this newspaper.

So, to those loyal readers who’ve come to see the paper in a certain way over the years, here’s a few of the changes we’ll be instituting this semester:

• Regular updates of our main Twitter (www.twitter.com/badgerherald), a tip line for readers to reply to (www.twitter.com/madisontips), and a question-and-answer line where we will attempt to take your random curiosities about the campus and Madison and answer them in print and online, as best we can.
• Daily video updates, ranging from weekly sports recaps, video stories and webcam debates.
• Video shout-outs. Look out for that e-mail.
• Regular news columns by our editors trying to explain more nuanced facets of the daily news in a way that breaks apart the spin called our “News Explainer.”
• A few slight font changes to our newspaper, which will eventually become a full-fledged redesign next semester. (Don’t worry, we’re not talking Chicago Tribune-level here.)
• A reenergized collection of blogs to be relaunched later in the semester.

These are small tweaks to begin with, and more substantive changes will follow in the second semester if everything goes to plan.

Yet, one thing should never change. We may be college students, but this is still a newspaper. And we are still journalists. I expect the same level of investigative spirit, determination and professionalism that any major paper would expect of their writers. While I can’t promise that we’ll be perfect, I assure you that every person here is dedicated to that search for the truth.

And in the end, that’s one thing that we’ll never tamper with.

Jason Smathers ([email protected]) is a first-year graduate student majoring in journalism.