If the post confuses you, I'll try and clear a few things up. This paper is still giving stipends to editors and senior reporters. They can't take even a small cut in their stipends to provide a modest stipend for someone whose skills are exceedingly more marketable than the ability to write in AP-style.
College newspapers don't have much money these days. Print advertising is drying up and monetizing web content is not working well. At my college newspaper, we don't pay anybody, editors included, (although we do have financial aid), yet we have a dedicated web staff.
The newspaper isn't really different from any other club. It's a lot of work, but you don't join a club to get paid, you join to meet people, work on interesting problems, and learn about something different.
Eh. They're not all like this. My college paper pays their web folks, and their online editor actually took it upon herself to learn some programming so she could help out and understand the technical side. I was pretty damn impressed actually.
Andrew Dunn sat on our Board when we were a non-profit, and has been involved in the conversation about CoPress and college media since the beginning, but he's been the Editor-in-Chief
Part of the trouble is also that the decision makers in charge of adding staff and directing the digital version(s) of the Daily Collegian are not well versed in the technology themselves. They probably just copied and pasted the job post from last time and added in whatever new they needed, without knowing that these can be extremely diverse skillsets. "Let's make an iPhone app! Add it to the job description!" A lot of people think if you're "good with computers," you can do it all.
This is true of many non-college newspapers even. It's changing, slowly, but many of the people in charge today started when linotype machines were the norm, and had been for the last 6 decades.
Newspapers are (still) not used to the modern pace of technology. My last job, the editorial system was more than 12 years old, and was still running on the original boxes 12-year-old dell boxes. Some had no USB ports, most had no sound cards.
Penn State has given birth to several prominent startups: YNOT Advertising (LionMenus), Xobni, and Weebly (YC).
If you want, you can add FanGamb (DreamIt) to the list :)
At the Daily Bruin all interns were unpaid. Typically after 6-12 months of part-time work (in any editorial department) there was opportunity to move up to senior staff positions and earn a stipend. That staff would put in 40-80 weeks on top of a course load, earning $2-3 per hour. I think it's very fair to bring on an unpaid dev intern and then let them work towards the stipend just like editorial positions. I wouldn't be surprised if the paper also employs a full time sysadmin/dev, for a real wage.
I'm at UCLA now, and over the last few weeks I've seen front page classifieds for DB hiring front end and backend devs. They're definitely paid hourly (I think I saw 14/hour, but I may be wrong)
Ha, I actually went out to grab a paper because I recalled seeing this too. Those ads were for Student Media which I guess Daily Bruin is a part of. It advertised "pay competitive with any on campus."
As for other other jobs on campus, I saw that the Volunteer Center was hiring "Wordpress programmers" for $19/hr a couple months ago.
Applicants need a working knowledge of ASP/ASP.net, MySQL, Movable Type, HTML/CSS and general web server experience. Knowledge of JavaScript, LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) servers, iPhone development knowledge, Adobe Flash/Flex is a plus.
I guess this is what PG meant when he said:
The pointy-haired boss has no idea how this software has to work, and can't tell one programming language from another, and yet he knows what language you should write it in.
Nonsense! I'm sure the editor-in-chief's major in print journalism and women's studies, as well as extensive experience as an "investigative team leader", is more than enough qualification to manage internet things. ;)
More seriously, it's probably hard to find good staff for that on a student newspaper. I think it would help their case if they wrote it in a more friendly tone than "Please submit a cover letter, resume and work samples to editorinchief@psucollegian.com. Submit applications by 5 p.m. March 1". Sounds very pretentious considering they're begging for a volunteer.
Sure - the editor in chief, or whoever on staff wrote that description, doesn't really know ASP from LAMP. But they do know the current programmers use ASP.net and MT, and will need to continue using ASP.net and MT for the time being.
In the past three years, the collegian website has added a lot of great features, and the design has improved considerably. It looks like they're still stuck on an old ASP backend, but the students responsible for the front page have been moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, its a pretty huge undertaking for unpaid (or close) full time students to replace a decent working site with a decade of archives with with a Rails app.
In many ways, the Collegian is a representative good college daily - there are many in much deeper trouble for failing to grasp the basics of good journalism, not the basics of web 2.0. (Disclosure: Former Collegian photo staff)
The Collegian web site was cutting edge a few years ago. My predecessors really did a hell of a job cooking up a brand new system (built on MT). The previous system, from what I read, was archaic.
Sadly not much has changed over the last couple years and without proper staff, nothing really will change.
In this case, it's apparent that they have a pre-existing system. Of course, why that system is in both ASP and PHP on both Linux and Windows, I have no clue.
Given that they have MySQL on there twice, I'm going to guess it was a "write down every technical term that anyone knows" kinda thing.
Most college newspapers actually outsource the content management and hosting for their websites to a company called College Publisher (owned by Viacom).
College Publisher takes 100% of the advertising revenue in exchange for hosting the site and providing a CMS for "free". It's a small but lucrative niche for Viacom.
By not giving up 100% of its online advertising revenue, this paper is actually well ahead of its peers.
I doubt a college newspaper would rake in the moolah with online advertisement. I remember my college paper getting most of their paid ads from local restaurants and businesses
They don't look very smart by not taking Viacom on their offer and then asking for a volunteer web developer to work on the site.
In this regard, you are absolutely right. The decision not to use College Publisher a few years back was very smart. However, the system is relatively old and tough to extend. These are solvable problems, assuming you have a capable web staff to handle it.
>By not giving up 100% of its online advertising revenue, this paper is actually well ahead of its peers.
Most colleges see very little in terms of revenue from advertising. They charge enough to cover expenses and wouldn't dream of changing their pricing to become profitable.
My University paper did something like this. They were looking for someone to do some website design and maintenance for them at $300 a semester, and I offered to help. Not because eleven dollars a week rewards the effort I would put in, but because I felt like helping my University fix their embarrassing web presence.
In the end, despite the fact that I had worked with them before, and came recommended by the CS department, they demanded a full resume and a burned CD with examples of previous work before they would even talk to me! They ended up with an English major who "had experience with Dreamweaver", and clearly didn't mind jumping through hoops for negligible reward :P
It seems most senior staff for college papers (the journalism majors) think that they can very easily apply their expertise and authority of print journalism (most of what's being taught in journo programs) to the web. It doesn't work and creates insulting instances like your story.
I used to be the online manager at my college newspaper (http://mndaily.com).
Working in the newspaper publishing environment is challenging for programmers. For instance, while online advertising made up a sizeable portion of the paper's revenue many of the salepeople at the paper had no idea where the ad spots were on the site or even what a CPM is.
Also challenging was working with different departments that had different workflows. We had to support the editorial process, the sales process, the hiring process, etc.
But wanting to get programmers for nothing is crazy. The programmers at the Daily were among the highest paid employees (only editor-in-chief, controller, and president were paid more than the online staff I believe) there and it would still takes months to fill a position with someone who had any competence (knew HTML and could write something more than Hello World in PHP).
While I know times are tough this is pretty disgraceful. College newspapers offer a good opportunity to get training in programming and allow prospective coders to start working with teams and real projects. But doing it for no pay really makes it a non-option.
You know what's gonna happen? Whichever boyfriend (or guy with a crush)[1] of a reporter there has the most tech knowledge is gonna get dragged into taking it over. I've been in that situation enough times (though usually with event stuff, not programming). That's basically the only shot they have at getting free skilled labor.
[1] - Not that girlfriends can't be programmers, but college girls seem to be better at roping guys into doing work for them than the other way around.
This ad is frighteningly similar to the ones out there in the real world at all but the most progressive papers, only difference is they pay a little bit better.
The problem is that tech people can go anywhere with their skills. They're not limited to journalism. This means that newsrooms should make it a priority to at least be somewhat competitive when it comes to hiring technical talent.
Exactly. For the aspiring journalists, working at the college paper is a sweet way to get an edge in the journalism world, something very few other jobs at that level can provide. For the web developer, this is merely one of thousands of opportunities, and holds no special lure for being the school paper. Clearly, the journalists/editors here are looking at it from their limited point of view. Given that, the tone of the ad is somewhat disrespectful ("you have to know everything, but we'll pay you nothing")
I like to think of an internship as a kind of apprenticeship. In some cases, the apprenticeship is worth it. For example, a tech internship at Google or Microsoft lets you work on some of the most widely used software in the world with some extremely competent people. In this instance perhaps being unpaid wouldn't really be a big deal -- the real value would be in the experience you get and the things you learn. Working for a college newspaper, however, is unlikely to provide a good CS student with anything more than they'd learn on their own with a rather useless name to drop at the end. While working for a college newspaper may be a high accomplishment in the journalism world, it doesn't really mean all that much in the tech world.
The problem is that a company run by content creators (and news/opinion articles are content just like film/music is) is going to tend to see the distribution of that content as ancillary to its creation. They then see the IT/web department as being on the same plane as the delivery-boys in terms of importance.
The Daily Collegian gives "scholarships" (stipends) to all editors and some senior reporters. These stipends don't come close to a wage, but it's something. Giving something to all editors and some reporters and then giving nothing to a web developer is insulting.
I don't understand why it's insulting. I assume that the editors and senior reporters have been on the paper for at least an academic year - otherwise, I don't see how they could become editors or senior reporters. So the little money they have goes to the people who've put significant amounts of time into the paper.
The advertisement is for a new staff member. I assume new reporters don't get stipends either. So I don't see why it's insulting to treat this staff member the same as other staff members.
Simultaneously, the advertisement is for the position in charge of their website and online presence (which is to say a decent portion of their operations), and is thus a fairly senior position.
Stuff just gets more complicated when money's involved. It's one thing to ask for a hand with something you're not making money off of, and another thing to ask for free help on a project that's paying you.
I think you and others are looking at it from a normal business transactions perspective. College papers aren't a business. I would be surprised if their advertisement revenue even covered operation costs. Students work on college papers for the same reason they attend class: to learn.
Also, I think you're using "senior" in a different manner than I. I'm using it to mean seniority, or length of time spent working on the paper. You're using it to denote importance.
As a learning experience, this sounds fairly sub-par. Having just finished college, I'll say that the thing that made extra-curriculars a great learning experience was the ability to work with people who knew as much as or more than you. As a reporter at that paper, you'd get a lot of low-risk practice writing articles, and get advice and critiques from people with a few year's experience. By contrast, this job for the college paper would be throwing yourself into a position where others depend on you, and you have no one to learn from. It's all the difficulty of self-teaching and working with the safety net of a mentor, combined with all the responsibility of having dozens of other people depend on your work.
I was shocked years later when I worked with some MSM how amateur they were compared with the fairly "best practice" stuff we invented ourselves for our university paper.
Personally, the best learning environments I've ever been in were when I was at the sharp end of the problem, and had to work it out with other people from first principles. I'll never forget what I learned with sweat running down my forehead.
More traditional teaching like tutorials or apprenticeship-like things aren't so memorable for me, and the apprenticeship model (apart from the positive side of implicit learning of many intangible processes) tends to lead to repetition of ages-old worst practices by the learners in later life.
The reason college organizations develop these best practices is because they're ideally structured for an apprectice-ship/mentor-ship situation. Even the highest ranking and most experienced student has only been there for 3-4 years, so they're experienced enough to know what worked in the past, but the turn-over's high enough to avoid getting bogged down in "this is how we've always done it" or "that didn't work last time". Because the old guard is out in the Real World in a few years, there's less of a delay for a genuine innovator to move from rookie to chief. In the corporate world, those innovative youngsters get frustrated with the idea of spending 10+ years climbing the corporate ladder to be able to put their good ideas and/or unique perspective to use, so some of them quit and become entrepreneurs.
It's a very fine line that 3-5 year programs seem to walk rather well.
It's better than nothing. In a bad economy, it's hard to get professional experience before graduation. Doing this probably wouldn't be as good as a paid internship at a company, but it's better than having nothing on the resume.
1) Did they have to qualify, and was there a hiring process other than 'we have a spot and I've read some of your work and like it'?
2) How many hours were they expected to work? The only way to rope someone into, say ,20 hours or more a week without pay is under the flag 'intern'
.
It is worth noting in many other fields you ask for 40 hours/week unpaid in a remote city (and you don't cover living costs) you'll have people climbing over each other to get the position. I've never seen this with engineering types though. Perhaps this is because interns in other fields are like apprentices, looking over the boss's shoulder and playing gopher, while in engineering jobs an internship seems to be the same as a regular job, except paid less.
(can't say for sure that they actually want that many hours though)
Also notice they are not really offering a learning experience. They are asking for someone who has finished with the learning part to just come on in and do this task already.
Its quite different to have an upaid internship for a reporter compared to a web programmer. A reporter is essentially useless until he/she has spent a fair amount of time learning the trade from the senior journalists. Building contacts, how to dig and research, gut feelings, etc ... all that comes from watching and experience. This is precisely what interships are for.
There are more than 600 college newspapers in the US. This means that an opportunity exists in these hyper-local markets to also report community news and, perhaps, create something that may "save" (I know that's the wrong word) the newspaper publishing industry.
I don't see how this is different from the real world. I see lots of ads for "Unpaid Internships" that want extensive knowledge of the field and expect you to already have the skills and experience the internship is supposed to teach you.
My other favorite is looking for a technical person for whom they will "split the profits". Your local CraigsList "computer gigs" section will be filled with these.
My favorite recent:
"We are a couple of mompreneurs who are launching a business geared to moms.
We are looking for someone, preferably a mom so you will already have knowledge of the target market, to help us with website design, online promotion etc. etc."
http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/rds/cpg/1621222670.html
That's hilarious. Doubtless they'll be offering a smaller share of the profits as they're bringing their all important idea to the table.
I think I'm going to try this stunt with every service I consume. "Yes, you see, you give me a haircut for free and then we split any resultant profits. 70-30, because the haircut was my idea".
Maybe web developers can sell themselves as "Marketing specialists". There seems to be a higher expectation of good pay with that among the non-tech savvy...
The difference is that you assume that the learning + industry experience + chance at a job later will make up for the not-being-paid. In this case, there is no potential for getting a foot in the door, no industry experience, and the 'learning' is questionable, particularly when you could use the same skills to make $25-50 an hour freelancing.
Why the heck is it still so hard to make iPhone applications? You'd think some smart HNer would realize that every publication on the planet wants to have its own iPhone app. But few of them can afford to pay someone $10k to build one. I bet a lot of them could afford to pay $500 bucks though...
Not enough vision here... its a potentially great way to get free press and ad space for your project while learning a bit about all the newspapers that will be desparate for any programmer with knowledge of a dying industry can be saved.
