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Comment by adelevie | Hacker News Reader

If the post confuses you, I'll try and clear a few things up. This paper is still giving stipends to editors and senior reporters. They can't take even a small cut in their stipends to provide a modest stipend for someone whose skills are exceedingly more marketable than the ability to write in AP-style.

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College newspapers don't have much money these days. Print advertising is drying up and monetizing web content is not working well. At my college newspaper, we don't pay anybody, editors included, (although we do have financial aid), yet we have a dedicated web staff.

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.

jesh. I went there. That is my college paper. And this disappoints me.

It is a good reflection on the newspaper industry

Eh. They're not all like this. My college paper pays their web folks, and their online editor actually took it upon herself to learn some programming so she could help out and understand the technical side. I was pretty damn impressed actually.

That's very refreshing. What paper is this?

UNC, Daily Tar Heel.

who was it? I remember there was a guy from the Tar Heel very involved with CoPress for a while.

Andrew Dunn sat on our Board when we were a non-profit, and has been involved in the conversation about CoPress and college media since the beginning, but he's been the Editor-in-Chief

Not he, she. @saragregory

I'm still a student at Penn State and I used to work at that paper. The demanded skillset has increased while the stipend has cratered to zero.

ps: I'm aware of your accomplishments. You make the Penn State startup community proud! Best of luck with Xobni!

Part of the trouble is also that the decision makers in charge of adding staff and directing the digital version(s) of the Daily Collegian are not well versed in the technology themselves. They probably just copied and pasted the job post from last time and added in whatever new they needed, without knowing that these can be extremely diverse skillsets. "Let's make an iPhone app! Add it to the job description!" A lot of people think if you're "good with computers," you can do it all.

This is true of many non-college newspapers even. It's changing, slowly, but many of the people in charge today started when linotype machines were the norm, and had been for the last 6 decades.

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.

I didn't know Xobni was made by a Penn State grad!

Penn State has given birth to several prominent startups: YNOT Advertising (LionMenus), Xobni, and Weebly (YC). If you want, you can add FanGamb (DreamIt) to the list :)

Actually, there is another recent startup success from Penn State. Aaron Gotwalt of CoTweet was a 2004 grad. CoTweet was just acquired this week.

love it

At the Daily Bruin all interns were unpaid. Typically after 6-12 months of part-time work (in any editorial department) there was opportunity to move up to senior staff positions and earn a stipend. That staff would put in 40-80 weeks on top of a course load, earning $2-3 per hour. I think it's very fair to bring on an unpaid dev intern and then let them work towards the stipend just like editorial positions. I wouldn't be surprised if the paper also employs a full time sysadmin/dev, for a real wage.

I'm at UCLA now, and over the last few weeks I've seen front page classifieds for DB hiring front end and backend devs. They're definitely paid hourly (I think I saw 14/hour, but I may be wrong)

Ha, I actually went out to grab a paper because I recalled seeing this too. Those ads were for Student Media which I guess Daily Bruin is a part of. It advertised "pay competitive with any on campus."

As for other other jobs on campus, I saw that the Volunteer Center was hiring "Wordpress programmers" for $19/hr a couple months ago.

Now I wish I had paid more attention in PIC 40A this quarter... By the way, UCLA HNers need to do a meet up

I've only identified about 4 UCLA HNers, one of which tried to do an LA meetup without much success http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804191

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