“But this first night is always a long effort.”

I said last night, around 11 p.m. If I had known better I would have written it differently.

I would have written “It will be a long night.” The headline above this would have read “And by long night I meant …”

And the text would have simply said “5:30 a.m.”

Now, to be clear: I don’t mind. I’ve been tired all day, but that’s part of the job and I love the job. After a series of first-issue problems, trial and errors the new staff put to bed a nice first edition this morning. I wouldn’t have minded a few more hours of sleep before saying that, but that’s the price of education by experience some time.

So about two-and-a-half or three hours of sleep this morning. And then today was our high school journalism workshop.

We had two series of sessions this morning and then two more sets in the afternoon. More than 300 students from across the area joined us.

Southern Living’s Kim Cross discussed their commendable series, Lessons from the Storm as a study in the use of multimedia.

CBS-42 reporter and Samford grad Kaitlin McCulley talked about television packages:

The kids had a great day:

I had an afternoon session, where two of the staffers from The Samford Crimson joined me. You can tell by their reaction that I’d just made a profoundly important point:

Anyway. After the workshop was concluded I taught a class on leads. It is perhaps one of my better lectures, which works out well since it is the first thing you read and an important component of a news story. That’s the first thing the journalism professors read when their students have created another issue of the campus paper.

Speaking of the Crimson, this was a big day. Sure, it was the first issue of the year. And it was delayed because of the storms that caused a campus-wide power outage yesterday. But, the paper returned to a tab size this year.

And the issue looks nice, too.

Also, we re-launched a new version of the Crimson’s website, too. There’s a lot to come from this new design and the content management system behind it — we switched from College Publisher, which is somewhat limited, to WordPress.

Here’s a screen capture of the old version:

And here’s the new version:

In this first issue we already have five feature stories, represented in those thumbnails below the main photograph. Below the fold the stories fall into a neat structure. There’s better comment moderation strength, ease of publication, a system I can teach to new students in under an hour and a very clean look.

Now we just need to put ads on it.