New VanCougar Website

On the weekend of March 10, I and other people from The VanCougar attended a college journalism convention in Portland. One of the speakers was Dan Savage, who writes Savage Love, a sex and relationship advice column, and also edits The Stranger, an alternative newspaper in Seattle.

Unsurprisingly for anyone who has read one of his columns, Savage's lecture was filled with profanities, references to sex, and gibes at the current national government. This definitely made his lecture interesting. But what I really took away from the lecture is this: While print newspapers will probably always be around, they will be online more and more. Twice as many people read The New York Times online than subscribe to it in print. More and more people get their news from blogs and websites and of course, podcasts and social networking sites are getting increasingly popular. Savage's newspaper, The Stranger, has a popular blog as well as video, podcasts, and RSS feeds.

With this advice in mind, which we've heard from lots of people in the newspaper industry, we are working on a new website, which will be unveiled within the next few weeks. We plan that it will be at www.vancougar.com. We'll still have stories available in PDF format, as we do now, but we'll also have them in regular HTML format. We are hoping to have comments enabled on all stories so that you can let us know what you think. And we'll have an easy form that you can fill out to send us a letter.

If you have suggestions for us as we put more content online, let us know. And we are wondering: Where do you get most of your news each day? Is it in print, online, on the radio, on TV, or from other sources?