This is why (college) old media is failing
collegian.psu.edu
collegian.psu.edu
It is a good reflection on the newspaper industry
ps: I'm aware of your accomplishments. You make the Penn State startup community proud! Best of luck with Xobni!
Newspapers are (still) not used to the modern pace of technology. My last job, the editorial system was more than 12 years old, and was still running on the original boxes 12-year-old dell boxes. Some had no USB ports, most had no sound cards.
As for other other jobs on campus, I saw that the Volunteer Center was hiring "Wordpress programmers" for $19/hr a couple months ago.
The newspaper isn't really different from any other club. It's a lot of work, but you don't join a club to get paid, you join to meet people, work on interesting problems, and learn about something different.
I guess this is what PG meant when he said:
The pointy-haired boss has no idea how this software has to work, and can't tell one programming language from another, and yet he knows what language you should write it in.
Given that they have MySQL on there twice, I'm going to guess it was a "write down every technical term that anyone knows" kinda thing.
In the past three years, the collegian website has added a lot of great features, and the design has improved considerably. It looks like they're still stuck on an old ASP backend, but the students responsible for the front page have been moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, its a pretty huge undertaking for unpaid (or close) full time students to replace a decent working site with a decade of archives with with a Rails app.
In many ways, the Collegian is a representative good college daily - there are many in much deeper trouble for failing to grasp the basics of good journalism, not the basics of web 2.0. (Disclosure: Former Collegian photo staff)
Sadly not much has changed over the last couple years and without proper staff, nothing really will change.
More seriously, it's probably hard to find good staff for that on a student newspaper. I think it would help their case if they wrote it in a more friendly tone than "Please submit a cover letter, resume and work samples to editorinchief@psucollegian.com. Submit applications by 5 p.m. March 1". Sounds very pretentious considering they're begging for a volunteer.
College Publisher takes 100% of the advertising revenue in exchange for hosting the site and providing a CMS for "free". It's a small but lucrative niche for Viacom.
By not giving up 100% of its online advertising revenue, this paper is actually well ahead of its peers.
Most colleges see very little in terms of revenue from advertising. They charge enough to cover expenses and wouldn't dream of changing their pricing to become profitable.
They don't look very smart by not taking Viacom on their offer and then asking for a volunteer web developer to work on the site.
In the end, despite the fact that I had worked with them before, and came recommended by the CS department, they demanded a full resume and a burned CD with examples of previous work before they would even talk to me! They ended up with an English major who "had experience with Dreamweaver", and clearly didn't mind jumping through hoops for negligible reward :P
Working in the newspaper publishing environment is challenging for programmers. For instance, while online advertising made up a sizeable portion of the paper's revenue many of the salepeople at the paper had no idea where the ad spots were on the site or even what a CPM is.
Also challenging was working with different departments that had different workflows. We had to support the editorial process, the sales process, the hiring process, etc.
But wanting to get programmers for nothing is crazy. The programmers at the Daily were among the highest paid employees (only editor-in-chief, controller, and president were paid more than the online staff I believe) there and it would still takes months to fill a position with someone who had any competence (knew HTML and could write something more than Hello World in PHP).
While I know times are tough this is pretty disgraceful. College newspapers offer a good opportunity to get training in programming and allow prospective coders to start working with teams and real projects. But doing it for no pay really makes it a non-option.
My odds of winning and her odds of finding someone are about the same.
[1] - Not that girlfriends can't be programmers, but college girls seem to be better at roping guys into doing work for them than the other way around.
Also, Microsoft and Google pay. They pay a lot.
Theoretically, it could mean they want to switch. Theoretically.
The advertisement is for a new staff member. I assume new reporters don't get stipends either. So I don't see why it's insulting to treat this staff member the same as other staff members.
Stuff just gets more complicated when money's involved. It's one thing to ask for a hand with something you're not making money off of, and another thing to ask for free help on a project that's paying you.
Also, I think you're using "senior" in a different manner than I. I'm using it to mean seniority, or length of time spent working on the paper. You're using it to denote importance.
Personally, the best learning environments I've ever been in were when I was at the sharp end of the problem, and had to work it out with other people from first principles. I'll never forget what I learned with sweat running down my forehead.
More traditional teaching like tutorials or apprenticeship-like things aren't so memorable for me, and the apprenticeship model (apart from the positive side of implicit learning of many intangible processes) tends to lead to repetition of ages-old worst practices by the learners in later life.
It's a very fine line that 3-5 year programs seem to walk rather well.
2) How many hours were they expected to work? The only way to rope someone into, say ,20 hours or more a week without pay is under the flag 'intern' . It is worth noting in many other fields you ask for 40 hours/week unpaid in a remote city (and you don't cover living costs) you'll have people climbing over each other to get the position. I've never seen this with engineering types though. Perhaps this is because interns in other fields are like apprentices, looking over the boss's shoulder and playing gopher, while in engineering jobs an internship seems to be the same as a regular job, except paid less.
(can't say for sure that they actually want that many hours though)
Also notice they are not really offering a learning experience. They are asking for someone who has finished with the learning part to just come on in and do this task already.
-Marcio
My favorite recent: "We are a couple of mompreneurs who are launching a business geared to moms. We are looking for someone, preferably a mom so you will already have knowledge of the target market, to help us with website design, online promotion etc. etc." http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/rds/cpg/1621222670.html
I think I'm going to try this stunt with every service I consume. "Yes, you see, you give me a haircut for free and then we split any resultant profits. 70-30, because the haircut was my idea".