Campus papers spend a lot of time creating content. Your paper’s content includes all the articles and media created, edited and polished by staff for each issue and the design you dressed them up in for publication.

Try tracking how much content your paper produces for each issue. After a few issues, that pile will start to add up. After a few years, you’ve got a serious database representing the combined efforts of hundreds or maybe thousands of contributors. While this archive may be of little immediate value to newpaper volunteers, to editors it should represent a publishing tradition, a historical record and, who knows, maybe even a future revenue stream.

Maintaning that publishing tradition and historical record falls on the current management of your paper, typically its editors. That means a lot of former (and future) contributors are relying on your editors’ wits to protect a legacy they helped create. That editor might even be you.

Are you doing a good job? Try really thinking about it.
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