Adell Crowe is on a mission.
She spent most of Wednesday driving from West Virginia University to Wheeling to shake hands and network with newspaper editors there.
This was just the first of many trips she hopes to take this summer to introduce herself and tell folks in the journalism world to watch out for her students.
Crowe was named the director of student media at West Virginia University in March, a new position administrators hope will revamp and re-energize the school's student newspaper and college radio station, which she will directly oversee. Already in her two months at the post, she's been at the helm of some major changes.
The Daily Athenaeum, the school's more than century-old newspaper, will finally stop printing newspapers five days a week. A message appeared recently on the paper's website noting that instead, the paper will print three days a week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) and will strive for online content every day.
"I really tried to be cognizant of coming in at the end of the year and marching in and saying, 'OK everybody, things are changing,'" Crowe said.
But things had to change.
Declining revenue from advertising and an audience that's more likely to read a story on Facebook or Twitter than a printed product meant one thing: more digital. The paper's staff will put a greater emphasis on its website and other multimedia elements to its stories.
"I don't know if I'll be hands on once everybody gets back. I view it as we're creating structure here and it will be the students here who have to make it run," Crowe said. "What we're hoping to do is not dictate in any way or interfere in any way with the choices students should make about student coverage."
Caity Coyne, a rising-senior at WVU, will have a say in those choices. She was chosen as the paper's next editor-in-chief and has been fielding questions from her staff about the changes since the announcement.
This past year, every staff member of the paper was paid. Writers received $17 a story, photographers roughly $12 a photo and editors somewhere between $25 and $45 per issue, depending on their rank.
That's changing, too.
Instead of paying every staffer, Crowe said Coyne will be given a stipend budget - the amount of which has yet to be nailed down. From that, Coyne said she will probably pay all of the paper's editors, but neither writers nor photographers will be paid at all.
Coyne said it was challenging to find students who want to write for the paper even when it was a paid job. Now that it isn't, her challenge will be to convince journalism students to work for the paper not just for some extra cash, but because of the experience they will have.
"For the most part, people who have worked here before who are not getting paid next year - they were pretty shocked," Coyne said. "But the other side of that, too, working at the [Daily Athenaeum] is an experience. It's a social atmosphere. I've met my best friends working here."
Crowe shares a similar story.
When she went to the University of Missouri in the 1970s, she said she found her "refuge" in student media. It was there that she not only learned how to be a journalist but where she found her place in a community.
As Crowe prepares for her incoming students, she outlines her three goals to them: to cover the WVU community better than anyone else, to get prepared for a job in the media after graduation and to have lots of fun along the way.
During Crowe's last job as the assistant director of student media at American University, she was there when the school's paper went from printing twice a week to twice a semester. Prior to that, she worked as a reporter for 30 years at places like Nashville's Tennessean and USA Today, according to a news release.
Changes to student newspapers aren't an uncommon thing across the United States and even in West Virginia.
This past fall, Marshall University's student newspaper, The Parthenon, underwent similar changes, deciding to stop printing four days a week and only print two times a week. "At this point, eventually we will go down toward one day a week and be more of a news magazine type format," said Sandy York, the Parthenon's adviser. "We're headed there right now."
At Marshall, there are closer ties between the journalism program and the student newspaper than there are at WVU. Marshall journalism students take a class that requires them to submit at least 28 articles to The Parthenon throughout the semester.
That keeps a constant flow of stories coming into the paper, York said. But when news breaks late at night or on the weekend, it is the editors - who get paid stipends - that are the ones to put in the late hours and cover it.
"There's actually more of our product out there than we've ever had before," York said.
Reach Jake Jarvis at jake.jarvis@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-7939 or follow @NewsroomJake on Twitter.