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.
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.
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.
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.