The Cavalier Daily has a slight problem: it isn’t daily. The twice-weekly newspaper updates its website daily, sure, but the newspaper itself doesn’t qualify for even the standard college definition of daily, under which five days a week counts. The paper used to publish four times a week, Monday through Thursday, until 2013, when editors decided to cut back the print product to focus on web and mobile content.
Since the decision to cut back was not recent, it makes little sense to harp on the loss readers suffered. The more pressing question for The Cavalier Daily — aside from whether it ought to change its name to reflect its new identity — is how the paper ought to position itself in the wake of the 2013 decision. That is a question editors should be asking constantly.
Editor-in-Chief Julia Horowitz has a balanced sense of what the shift has meant for the paper’s coverage. “Working with a print deadline ensures quantity of content,” she said in an interview. Staffers have to fill the paper’s pages, and “there’s definitely a diligence that comes along with that.” Without that daily crush, “something can fall through the cracks.” I’ve discussed some of those cracks in past columns; there’s no reason a nightly deadline should be necessary to avoid them, but The Cavalier Daily should continue to fight against the complacency the freedom of the Internet can afford.
With the online product as the primary focus, by contrast, “there’s nothing to fill space — everything has a purpose,” Horowitz said. That’s exactly the right approach to digital platforms; the next step is to expand and play with what that purpose can be.
To make the most of its digital platforms and to justify the decision to focus on them, The Cavalier Daily should be offering online content that cannot exist in print. Undoubtedly, something is lost when paper is abandoned. Readers are less likely to read widely online, where attention goes only where a reader is interested, not where his eyes happen to land on a page with many offerings. A phone is a much less pleasant or user-friendly breakfast companion than a broadsheet, and graphics, reduced to small sizes, don’t work as well. Readers lose the tactile sense of connection to their world that an inky page provides.
The Cavalier Daily chooses the best of its stories to run in its two print editions each week; often, reporters return to stories already published online and flesh them out for a second run in print. That extra level of depth elevates the quality of print stories — but those stories are still fundamentally recycled, not news.
The other significant loss particular to a college paper is physical presence. Cavalier Daily boxes still dot Grounds, but I’ve never seen anyone open one — and the pages they hold don’t offer the latest news. When newspapers are visible everywhere, strewn around dining halls and coffee shops, people are more likely to pick one up in passing and start reading. It takes a concerted decision, on the other hand, to visit a website or mobile app.
So if the shift is going to be redeemed, it’s important to capitalize on the unique opportunities of the digital realm. The Cavalier Daily could offer more interactive content: polls, chats, videos, graphics that display information or art in new ways.
As it is, cavalierdaily.com offers a clean visual presentation, and the mobile app is easy to navigate. Both are very competently designed, but both also look like digital versions of print products — only, in this case, that print product doesn’t exist. If The Cavalier Daily is really to be an excellent digital-first publication, it should imagine new possibilities in the digital world. Designers should experiment; reporters should team up with videographers, artists and data scientists to explore new ways of presenting stories.
Julia Fisher is the Public Editor for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at publiceditor@cavalierdaily.com or on Twitter at @CDPublicEditor.
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