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Comment by adelevie | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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

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