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As a college freshman some 50-plus years ago, I walked into the office of the school newspaper and promptly joined the staff. I had spent a frustrating high school senior year writing articles that never got to see the light of day. I wrote sports articles and that year there was plenty to write about. We had one of the best local high school football and basketball teams. One of my senior classmates led all Roanoke, Virginia city-county basketball players in scoring, so a lot of my basketball articles were about his game by game exploits. Yet we didn’t publish a single addition that year and I never knew why. Perhaps the school was short of funds or perhaps our newspaper faculty advisor, a gentle English teacher was not aggressive enough. I don’t know. Anyway, this experience was no doubt on my mind when I became a member of the North Carolina A & T College (now State University) newspaper. I was, I believe, the only freshman on the staff, but our advisor, a Mrs. Morrow, gave me carte blanche to write about anything I wanted to write about. I again wrote sports articles, drew cartoons, commented on campus “issues” and national civil rights issues that were taking place during this 1957-1961 period. I became a campus “celebrity” of sorts because my fellow students read the paper. I made my first trip to the big apple, New York City, with a senior staff member to attend a conference of college newspaper writers and publishers. In the spring of that year my English teacher would “excuse” me from class early to go and “cover” our baseball team’s home games. But A & T had no School of Journalism and, when I returned for my sophomore year, my interest in the newspaper had waned. For the remainder of my time at the college, I never wrote another article.
This “stroll down memory lane” came to mind as I read of a recent readership survey of more than 1200 college students at 550 colleges across all 50 states conducted by Alloy Media & Marketing showing that 76 % of the students had read their college newspaper in the past month. At those colleges that had daily newspapers, a whopping 92 % had read their school newspaper in the past month. With readership of main-stream newspapers reportedly on the decline, these numbers are encouraging. These are exactly the demographics that you would expect to be facebooking, blogging and twittering, not reading the printed word. Now we don’t know if the content of these papers are strictly “campus” issues or if they include broader issues, such as the economy and turmoil in the Middle East. But, if these young people are “the future”, dare we hope?
The study can be viewed at http://www.alloymarketing.com/corporate/pdf/nr.pdf
