Web presence, training program at core of new leader’s focus
Kristyn Sanito will serve as The Daily Gamecock’s editor-in-chief in the spring, the newspaper’s board of publications announced Friday.
Sanito, a fourth-year English student who currently works as the managing editor, will take the role from Colin Campbell, who will leave the student-run paper in December after two semesters as editor-in-chief. She has named Sydney Patterson, a third-year broadcast journalism student, her managing editor.
Under Campbell’s tenure, the newspaper has risen to No. 14 in the Princeton Review’s ranking of college newspapers, and Sanito said she wants to keep that momentum going, as the paper pursues its goals of keeping students informed and serving as a watchdog on the university’s administration.
“The paper has risen to legitimate standing as a news source for both the city and the state, and it’s the best news source for USC,” Sanito said.
Over the last year, The Daily Gamecock has rolled out a smartphone application and implemented a training program for new members, and both are priorities for the organization that Sanito and Patterson said they’d work to continue.
“We’ve made a push to go more Web-first than we’ve ever been this semester,” said Campbell, a fourth-year journalism student. “Kristyn and Sydney know this is a priority, and they will lead The Daily Gamecock well into the future.”
Still, the paper has struggled with a relatively small staff, a high turnover rate and a website that’s had technical difficulties in recent weeks, and Sanito said she’d like to begin to remedy these issues over the next semester.
Over the next few months, the paper will transition to a new website that will be released in the early spring and push an increasingly Web-oriented model, Sanito said, in an effort to reach a broader range of readers and to provide information faster.
Key to that effort will be a growing emphasis on producing multimedia packages and driving readers to the website with videos, photo slideshows and other features.
Over the fall semester, the website has grown its multimedia capabilities by forging a partnership with SGTV, the campus television station, Patterson noted, that has sent video journalists into the field with the paper’s reporters.
Top editors will also evaluate the training program and work to improve it, she said, as they aim to increase retention and the size of the paper’s staff and help the paper continue to sustain its level of work.
“I’m really proud of the body of work we’ve put together over the past year,” Campbell said. “Kristyn … knows the organization, she has the staff’s buy-in and she’s in the perfect position to further that progress as editor-in-chief.”