Doing It All
COLLEEN DULLE, a senior and the editor of The Maroon, says that she believes strongly in the power of journalism as a tool for social justice, even as the technology changes at a rapid pace.
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loyno | FALL 2016
One student in the middle of the maelstrom is Colleen Dulle. A St. Louis native, she began her Loyola career concentrating on public relations but shifted to journalism. She worked her way up through various roles at Loyola’s student newspaper, The Maroon, and now is the paper’s editor-in-chief. “Loyola trains us to be multimedia journalists,” Dulle says. “Gone are the days when you had to choose among the tracks of broadcast, TV, or print—you have to do it all,” she says. The Maroon staff switched to what Dulle calls a “digital-first workflow.” Now, the paper publishes stories online every day as news breaks and compiles the best stories from the week—along with a centerpiece feature focusing on a “big-picture” issue—for the paper’s weekly print issue. This has eased the workload on press production nights and trains students to work in the 24-hour digital news cycle. As Michael Giusti, SMC instructor and Maroon adviser, put it, “I told them to think of themselves as a newsroom that creates once and publishes everywhere.” The Maroon has been well-rewarded for its innovation and general excellence. In the 2014-2015 year, the paper was named the Princeton Review’s No. 4 Best College Newspaper in the Nation; it won the Associated Collegiate Press’ Pacemaker award, considered the Pulitzer Prize of student media; it earned an All-American distinction from the Associated Collegiate Press—and that’s just to name a few of the record-breaking 86 awards it won that year. So far in 2016, The Maroon has won the regional Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence for Best All-Around NonDaily Student Newspaper, along with many other individual writing awards. And because the Press Club of New Orleans doesn’t have college categories for its Excellence in Journalism Awards, The Maroon regularly wins in multiple categories against the city’s news professionals every year—for entries in photography, headline writing, news writing, and social media. “We are a tiny school with a program that’s excellent but not necessarily known on the national scale, and we’re winning against the national powerhouses—the Mizzous, the Columbias, the Stanfords,” Giusti says. “We’re able to compete and win, and a big piece of that is students approach it with excellence as their standard. When people say, ‘How do you win so many awards?’ I kind of joke, ‘We don’t know that we’re not supposed to.’”