Collegiate Times

This week’s column brings up several topics of interest.

First off, if you can’t change, then you will surely be left behind. This is an old adage that is becoming increasingly true, and in the world of student journalism and media, it probably rings even more truly. Although the Collegiate Times has proudly been the Online Pacemaker as awarded by the Associate Press in 2007 and 2008, and despite the fact that the paper is a finalist for the same award this year, we don’t stop trying to better ourselves.

Enter the online redesign. Along with the print redesign, we are constantly trying to keep things fresh, exciting and new at the CT. There were several new things about the new print version, so naturally there are also new things about the online redesign.

We tried to add new features and align things so that they are more useful to you, our readers. Hopefully, this will all be easier for you to navigate. Some new features that we’ve added to the Web site include an event calendar, which has several local events; a spotlight section, which has several of our special sections (including the recently tallied Best of Blacksburg); as well as our reprints Web site, through which you can order copies of the photos in the paper taken by SPPS.

Social interactions are also better on the new site. The blog now features Facebook Connect, and the comments now allow you to reply specifically to other reader’s remarks.

As I’ve heard feedback on our redesign, things have been both positive and negative. Some of the negative things I’ve heard are that it’s too out-dated looking, and that it is, in fact, more difficult to navigate than the old collegiatetimes.com.  Well, enter the Meet and Greet. This week, we held our second incarnation of the event to allow feedback on the redesign.

A lot of students told us about how they like the redesign and that they think it is more inviting. Several students most often read the paper in this medium, and it’s partially because of the fact that their computers are always readily available while the print version of the CT may not be.

Potential additions to the paper include placing the news racks in more convenient locations, inserting more coupons and more eye-catching headlines, and maybe that’s something we can work on to make people pick up the paper on the days that they normally don’t.

The second issue I wanted to discuss this week is a recent controversy over our online comments. Last week, we discovered that several comments started to “disappear” from our Web site. Several comments that did not satisfy our “candidate for deletion” policy were deleted unintentionally. This caused several constructive and permissible comments to be deleted from our Web site. What followed was a lot of criticism toward our staff for deleting such comments.

It is not our staff that deletes comments online. I am the sole individual on the CT staff that moderates, examines and deletes all comments. While any reader can flag a comment, I am the only one who logs into the Web site to delete them. Therefore, I personally take the fall for these mistakes. It appears that under the redesign, with the aforementioned new format of comments, if one responded directly to a comment and this new comment was deleted, related comments were also deleted unintentionally. This has since been fixed, and we have introduced a new format to remedy this problem.

If you have any comments or issues with any articles or columns, or there is something you’d like to say about how we operate, we encourage you to write letters to the editor. Our paper exists to not only inform the students of news and events, but also to create a dialogue — especially in our opinions section. Letters are an easy way to voice your opinion, and they are essential in ensuring that many aspects of a topic are explored in the ongoing, printed discussions. Any comments, concerns or ideas should be directed to our opinions editor, Debra Houchins.

Other issues that have yet to be brought up can be explored through guest columns. Anyone can write a guest column, and although we can’t guarantee that it will be printed, they are a great way to bring issues to light and start a new dialogue about your concerns. Most guest columns that are written in a professional and factually-sound way do get published.

So remember, we’re your student newspaper. Contributing your views about our content, layout and Web site can only help us serve the readers!

Any questions? publiceditor@collegiatetimes.com