Campus beat

One of life's great pleasures is sitting down with a good newspaper.

With the number of daily newspapers dwindling across the country, Coeur d'Alene readers are lucky to have two local dailies to choose from. They're also fortunate to have the opportunity to read The Sentinel, the student newspaper of North Idaho College.

Why fortunate?

Where else will you find a paper from a two-year community college that has won so many national awards for excellence in journalism? NIC's Sentinel has been landing awards in national competitions for years, and many of them came at the expense of larger, four-year schools.

Like many newspapers today, The Sentinel appears in print and online. NIC admission staff says they often receive applications because a potential student checked out the online Sentinel, and decided after reading it that NIC should be their college.

Readers can get the paper online at www.nic.edu/sentinel or can pick up a free copy on campus. Those expecting a slap-dash, tabloid- style college newspaper are in for a surprise. The Sentinel is full- sized and professionally designed. It has eye-catching photography, a great deal of it in color.

The Sentinel's target audience is the NIC student body, and it contains hard news, along with sports, entertainment and opinion.

All of the content is original; The Sentinel does not subscribe to UPI, Reuters or API news services. Since The Sentinel does not make a profit, fewer ads clutter its pages. Revenue earned from the paper goes directly into NIC's general fund.

Nils Rosdahl is The Sentinel's advisor and a journalism instructor at NIC. He radiates enthusiasm for the printed word and for the efforts of the students who create The Sentinel under his stewardship. Rosdahl started guiding the paper in 1985, shortly after its name change from The Cardinal Review. The paper has been in existence under various names since the 1930s, he said.

Seventeen years after taking the helm, Rosdahl says the reason the paper is so good is that students pass on a jealously guarded tradition of excellence. No one wants to be responsible for passing forward a shoddy product. To keep them sharp and on their toes, Rosdahl encourages his staff to enter competitions against papers from much larger schools. Each good edition and award simply spurs the staff to raise the bar a little higher for the next edition.

"The highpoint of working in this paper is that it is such a prestigious paper that is held to a high standard level in the country," said current editor Betsy Dalessio. "We have to work hard to uphold that honor. Also the experience is incredible. I've learned more in my year and a half about newspapers than I ever would have imagined."

To get an idea of the numerous awards the paper has garnered, taker a look at its online edition. Here you will see the paper's list of awards, including: National Pacemaker and Newspaper of the Year, General Excellence Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and National Hall of Fame.

Readers who prefer to get their news online should know The Sentinel also landed an award for Best Online Newspaper awarded by the National Society of Professional Journalists. These awards are just several of the many that the publication has earned.

Many student journalists say Rosdahl is largely responsible for the paper's success. He is competitive and encourages his students to get out there and go for the brass ring, they say. Rosdahl takes a hands-on approach that imbues the staff with a professional outlook.

The Sentinel goes toe-to-toe with the big boys in college publications across the country and does well. Former managing editor Ryan MacClanathan, now working in Bellevue, Wash., for the Eastside Journal as a copy desk chief, attributes part of the paper's success to the fact that it publishes fewer issues per semester than other college publications, about one issue every two weeks. This allows The Sentinel's staff to really "polish the paper," MacClanathan said.

It carries more color shots than most college papers, which makes the paper stand out in the eye-appeal category. MacClanathan was responsible for taking The Sentinel through its transition from a tabloid format to a full-size broadsheet, characterizing that effort as "a ton of hard work." MacClanathan emphatically says that his hands-on experience working for The Sentinel is largely responsible for where he is now.

Rosdahl said "dozens, perhaps hundreds" of Sentinel alumni have gone on to careers in journalism over the years.

NIC treats working for The Sentinel as a class with academic credits given to its student staff. Plus, the managing editor gets free tuition, a big motivating factor for potential editors. Working on this college paper is not simply something a student does to pass the time between other classes.

What could be a weak spot for the paper, but is not, is the fact that NIC is a two-year school. With students circulating through so frequently, there's a potential loss of continuity. Essentially, students have half the time to learn the publishing ropes, compared to their four-year-school counterparts.

Anne Wooden, The Sentinel's 2000 editor, said this means that NIC students must learn news writing in their first semester.

"That gives the Sentinel staff a huge advantage over other college newspapers," said Wooden, who now works as a page designer and copy editor at The Everett Herald. She added that Sentinel staff is encouraged by Rosdahl to take part in local internships outside of their daily Sentinel duties, further honing their journalistic chops. The results of this concentrated effort really show in each edition.

Said Wooden: "When I transferred from NIC to Colorado State University, I could design pages, take photos, write articles, edit stories and manage an entire newspaper staff, while students I met from other colleges were learning just one of those skills. Also, the Sentinel staff is in charge of all the paper's operations, including advertising and distribution.

"Being able to do more than one job for The Sentinel helped me decide how I wanted to shape my career,'" Wooden said. "The Sentinel is a very open environment for the staff, and they can choose to discover any part of the newspaper business."

Copyright 2002 Cowles Publishing Company
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