The latest in the months-long saga at N.C. State University’s student paper, the Technician, is a harsh editorial written by student editors calling out the school’s student media board:

Technician hasn’t faltered and fallen due to a lack of effort or passion from the students who run it, but because the umbrella which was supposed to provide it with a gentle hand has become Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fabled albatross, dragging it down, tearing students away and weakening the staff.

The editorial also seeks signatures on a petition to replace the current advising staff.

I’ve been closely following the plight of the Technician ever since hearing that former Editor Ty Johnson had been forced to step down. I truly sympathize with the staff’s requests for more editorial freedom. I know I am among the more fortunate student journalists to be able to work for a student paper that is entirely financially and editorially independent from the University, and I appreciate the difference that makes in our ability to report on campus.

But while I sympathize 100 percent with the Technician staff’s desire for independence, I’m still waiting for the staff to step up and lead the paper in the direction they say they want it to see it go. And so far, I haven’t seen too much of that (with the exception of this thoughtful set of recommendations from the committee led by former Editor Saja Hindi). If you really want change, don’t wait for it to come from the University or the student media board. Don’t just declare an act of sedition. Declare revolution.

Instead of editorializing about how you want more control, show what you’d do with it. Stop asking for permission and ask for forgiveness when you’re finished. Put out the kind of paper and website you think the Technician should, and don’t worry about what the advisers will say. What I’d emphasize:

• Narrow the focus to what you can do best. Think about what your readers are interested in, and stop doing things just because that’s-the-way-its-always-been-done. I’d focus on breaking news, student groups,sports and commentary. Make sure there’s a great campus calendar online.
• Social media. There’s not any interaction on the Technician’s Facebook page or Twitter account. Fix that. Appoint someone in charge of those accounts and reaching out to readers. Try Flickr and asking readers to submit photos. Answer reader questions on Formspring. Try Tumblr. Most importantly, make it a two-way conversation between staff and readers.
• Link, link, link. Point your readers to where they can find more information. Better still, use Publish2 to curate links to news elsewhere.
• Seek student bloggers to fill in what you can’t cover. UNC has a rich community of student and community bloggers, and I’m sure the same is true of N.C. State. Make it easy for them to submit guest posts, and create incentives for doing so.
• Ditch College Publisher. Build a Wordpress site over the summer. Check out the Edit Flow workflow fromCoPress to help manage multiple users. Come back in the fall and go web-first. Do your writing and editing in the CMS. Publish as soon as possible.

And if all else fails, quit the Technician. For a $10 domain name, a cheap web hosting plan and a free Wordpress theme, a group of students could easily band together to start their own online-only news organization with just the money they’d spend on beer in one night. Look at Onward State and NYU Local for inspiration. Breaking off and forming an independent online-only publication wouldn’t be easy, but it is the ultimate way to gain the editorial freedom the staff seeks.

Daily Tar Heel reporters and editors are now taking questions via Formspring.

Answering reader questions isn’t a new idea, but we’re excited about trying that with this new platform. This isn’t a tool that was created with a journalistic purpose in mind, but neither was Twitter or Facebook - two tools that have we now recognize have immense value for journalists.

Creating a forum where readers could easily ask questions of DTH staff has been on our radar for awhile, but we’ve been limited by time and ability. Formspring might not be the most nuanced way for us to accomplish this goal (I imagine the ratio of spam to legitimate questions will be high), but I’m happy we’re trying something new. I think this is a really good lesson for other college newspapers: Make the most with what you have, and stop waiting for something better that might never come.

This is a belated post, but I was interviewed earlier this month for a segment on Here and Now about the future of journalism. I don’t think I said anything groundbreaking, but I really am excited about the future of journalism. I love print, but I’m OK with journalism in any form.

Listen to the show.

Coolest thing about radio? Do-overs.

Q: How does tweeting an event differ from, say, live-blogging an event? Is there a difference?

A: I’ve never live-blogged an event, but I feel the principals of it vs. Twittering are similar. You’re trying to do updates as quickly as possible and as thorough as possible as the time allows for. Twitter imposes an additional space restriction because you only have 140 characters. You’re required to focus in on the key points.

Q: Do you think that something like Twitter is going to alter in any way how news is broken, does it fit in with the 24-hour news cycle of TV news networks and Web sites?

A: I think Twitter’s already altered how news is broken. The earthquake this summer was broken on Twitter before the Los Angeles Times had anything. And it’s not just Twitter that’s changing how news is broken - Wikipedia had Tim Russert’s entry updated to include his death before any news organization released the news. Social media in general makes it a lot easier for non-journalists to break news (and for journalists to break news). Twittering doesn’t give the full scope though - it’s great at announcing the news but hard to fit context into the space allowed. One of my favorite Tweets is this one by @lonelysandwich: “To be fair, if CNN could get away with HOLLYF**K EARTHQAKE!!!1! as the extent of its coverage, they’d likely have scooped your a**, Twitter.” (** mine).

Ryan Thornburg pointed out a story in the N.C. Press Association’s September newsletter about The Pilot, where I had a wonderful time interning last summer. By posting more frequently, they’ve increased their online readership by 14 percent in six weeks.

I just went to their Web site for the first time in probably six weeks, and I’m really excited by what I see: It’s a Tuesday (they publish Sunday, Wednesday and Friday), but there are five new stories on the Web not in the print.

When I was there last summer, there were definitely occasions when we published on the Web before print. I covered one meeting in Pinehurst, and we went Web first with it because The Fayetteville Observer reporter was there, and we didn’t want our readers to have to wait an extra day for the story because we knew in the time between, they’d just skip us. I wrote another, more in-depth story for the print edition.

Publisher David Woronoff said that he realized waiting to break news in paper to avoid tipping off competitors was “stupid.” That was something I emphasized this summer at my internship at The Salisbury Post, and something community journalism guru Jock Lauterer grilled in my head: Your newspaper’s Web site is not a different entity/brand/whatever than your print. You’re not scooping yourself by publishing online.

It sounds like The Pilot’s already done a lot to increase online readership, but I thought of a few other things they could do to make the Web site more user-friendly:

• Make the video and multimedia more prominent on the homepage - the blogs and multimedia are listed way down the page.
• On articles, provide dates for when they were published.
• The navigation bars on the left and then lower down the page on the right are bulky and confusing.
• Link to reporter’s e-mail addresses in the end taglines.
• Add a widget so that readers can share stories. Now you can e-mail it, print it, or e-mail an editor, but what about del.ici.ous? digg? etc.
• For stories that also have multimedia, link back and forth between the article and the media. The Pilot did this slideshow of photos to go with this story about a fire at the mill John Edwards worked at back in the day. But you have to search the archives to find the story, and it doesn’t link to the slideshow anywhere, and the slideshow doesn’t link to the article.
• Show related stories. It looks like they’re doing this for the latest stories for the most part, but this later story about the investigation into the fire doesn’t mention the previous articles. This story about a town facing trouble after digging up illegally buried homes does have links to related stories.
• Allow comments on stories. Make folks register, create a comments policy and enforce it, but let the space become a forum. 
• When new articles are published in between print editions, stick a time stamp on them so that people who have been going to the site will be reminded that this is new information.
• The photo gallery has hundreds of photos from community events all over. Give the readers the option to buy copies of the photos. And while you’re at it, give readers a chance to submit their own photos.