Texas Journalist goes online to report smoking ban

By Lorraine Branham

Each semester students and professors in the School of Journalism come together to produce The Texas Journalist, a lab newspaper aimed at giving students and faculty in various classes a chance to collaborate on a newspaper devoted to a single topic. Last fall we had planned to examine the smoking ban that started Sept. 1 in Austin – but Hurricane Katrina, followed by Rita, swept through Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, forcing us to shift gears and topics.

Photo by Sangril Han Lorraine Branham

But the wait was a good thing. By the time our students started reporting, the ban had been in place for several months and its effects began to hit home.

Today those TJ stories that look at whether the sidewalks have become dirtier, whether clubs lost money, and whether some folks quit smoking are more relevant and meaningful than they would have been seven months ago. And I didn’t know that some places where you can light up – such as the local bingo hall – still exist until I read this semester’s Texas Journalist. So, I hope you will still find the stories interesting and informative.

However, this semester’s paper differs from our previous editions in one respect – there is no print edition. I repeat: There is no paper version of the Texas Journalist; it’s strictly an online publication this time.This was not our original intent, though some of my colleagues argued for such a format.

In the past, we have always had an online version accompany the printed edition, much like most newspapers continue to operate. But doing TJ solely online was a matter of necessity rather than acceptance of print’s demise. TJ is a student- and faculty-produced project depending on various journalism classes to make it happen – reporting, feature writing, copy editing, design, photo and web publishing.

However, this spring, for the second semester in a row, we had to cancel the print design class because of too few students. Maybe it’s a lack of interest in newspaper editing and design or maybe it’s because we no longer require the course. Whatever the case, the class usually designing and laying out Texas Journalist was not available.

Last semester we handled the problem by pulling together a crew of former page design students under the guidance of Prof. Dustin Harp and retired senior lecturer Griff Singer. It was a worthy effort – and the paper got out on time. But this spring logistics proved too daunting..

Still, I was unwilling to cancel TJ. And Dr. George Sylvie’s reporting class was eager to get started on their smoking stories. Also, we still had a classroom full of students in the web publishing class, taught by Adjunct Instructor Amy Schmitz-Weiss. Her crew eagerly took on the online version as their predecessors had done. So, we proceeded to pull together TJO – Texas Journalist Online.

It seemed as if we should move in this direction – producing the paper online – the same direction sluggishly, grudgingly worked toward by the newspaper industry. Last year, The New York Times merged its newsroom and online operations, with online becoming an increasingly important and profitable function.

Across the country, newspapers are devoting more staff and resources to online editions to combat erosion of their advertising revenue and reader migration to other Internet sites, such as Yahoo and Google.

But the printed edition survives. There still is money to be made in print. Despite the industry’s incessant poor-mouthing, newspapers are enormously, almost shamefully profitable in most cases. But publishers know the well soon will run dry, prompting That’s why everyone ramps up their online operations and tries to figure how to make money at it. Online all the time, here we come.

But don’t hold the presses, the shuttering date of which no one can agree. Nor do many folks doubt that there always will be some version of the printed paper produced for a smaller audience. We all agree that readership continues to decline and that young people – such as our students – don’t read newspapers. And when they want news – which isn’t often – they go online.

But the fact that more and more people turn to the Internet for news doesn’t trouble me. In fact, I wish more would do so. I worry more about the declining interest in news, period. According to some studies, less than 10 percent of Internet use involves news sites. A lot of people surf the Web – but they aren’t reading news.

In fact, most of those reading online newspaper editions tend to be core readers and subscribers – people already interested in news. The Web offers more choices and news when they want it. Now we just have to figure how to make them want it.

I still rely on print, with four newspapers delivered to my door each morning (and I grab The Daily Texan when I get to campus). I also read The Washington Post and The Philadelphia Inquirer online and get headlines from CNN and CBS several times a day.

But I am not the typical news consumer and I know our students’ reading habits differ greatly from my own. Perhaps they won’t miss seeing print version of the Texas Journalist at all. Perhaps they will go online to read it. Perhaps they will start to go online for news as often as they do to chat, download music, socialize, and shop.

If putting the Texas Journalist online – and nowhere else – encourages our students to seek out news online, maybe we’ll do it again.