I t’s defiance that makes many college newspapers great, and The Daily Tar Heel is no exception. The Daily Tar Heel is driven by a dedicated group of journalists and editors who are committed to seeking out the truth, wherever that journey might take them. As the University community continues to grapple with the scandals that have come to light during the past few years, our newspaper will become a place where readers can get the analysis they need to understand the changes happening around them. But we often fail to meet our readers and our reporters where they need us most — in the formats they’re drawn to — with the thoughtful, investigative news they need. To better serve our audience and our journalists, I will execute a series of initiatives that will train our award-winning staff to satisfy our readers’ standards for accurate, timely news.
Implement a ‘Digital First’ strategy
As journalism students, we learn about the importance of platform-free operation strategies in newsrooms. When planning a project, a platform-free operation considers its visual and interactive potential alongside the newsworthiness of a story. It makes sure each of the aspects of the project will be treated equally and will reflect the news outlet’s high-quality production standards. At The Daily Tar Heel, we live for the print product. We spend dozens of hours a week pushing out the best possible content for our paper. This does not always translate well to the other Daily Tar Heel platforms, like dailytarheel.com or the mobile application. Our mobile application is outdated. It rarely syncs with the news we have available on dailytarheel.com and it fails to categorize news in an intuitive way. It has never met the standards of a professional college newspaper. I will work with mobile application developers to create a cost-effective way to improve our application’s service. By adopting a Digital First strategy, the stories and packages we produce for our print product will be enhanced through multimedia elements and primer stories for breaking news.
Readers deserve an engaged news source, and by recruiting students who can code interactive graphics, The Daily Tar Heel can give them just that. Our multimedia desk is consumed by its videography responsibilities and has long struggled to fulfill its mission to break news using multiple formats, whether that’s data visualizations, explanatory interactive graphics or unique visual features. I will recruit a team of coders who can tell our stories in an interactive way and allow our photo desk to absorb the responsibilities of assigning and editing our video content.
Place a premium on long term projects and investigations
As city desk editor for The Daily Tar Heel this year, I’ve grown to understand how difficult it can be to balance producing enough content to fill the daily papers with challenging our strongest reporters to dig deep to produce thoughtful, investigative journalism. To resolve this issue, I would institute a special projects and investigations team, which would be responsible for creating a series of special sections throughout the year dedicated to ongoing and emerging trends readers care about.
As journalists we are also expected to curate the news for our readers in orderly, helpful ways. The Focus Pages of years past allowed desk editors to identify trends occurring on the desk and produce an entire page of content dedicated to the trend. The Focus Pages allowed a fuller understanding of the news occurring on each desk, and it allowed reporters and designers to dig deeper into the stories they were covering.
In that same vein, narrative journalism has not yet found a place in The Daily Tar Heel newsroom, and I want to give it one. Our readers deserve the kind of unearthed truths that magazine-style writing produces and our reporters and photographers deserve the chance to learn about a growing area of journalism.
Establish fluidity in the newsroom to improve retention rates
