University Plans iPad Student Paper

CC-licensed, thanks GlennFleishman on Flickr.

Perhaps in a bid to become the world’s leading iCollege, Abilene Christian University will publish an edition of the school paper designed for iPad.

The Texas institution — where the IT studies department was rechristened iSchool — started equipping freshmen with iPhones and iPod Touches back in 2008. The iSchool also started prepping iPhone devs of the future with a 2009 programming course.

Since 2007, they’ve also published the twice-weekly school paper dubbed “The Optimist” (a commentary on future journalists?) for the iPhone.

“The faculty as a whole and the department discussed it, and we said we have to do this,” Dr. Cheryl Bacon,  chairwoman of the department of journalism and mass communications told The Daily Orange. “It’s just too good of an opportunity to pass up.”

A crew of four professors — two from the journalism department and one each from iSchool and graphic design –  plus 10 students are working on an edition to launch on the same day as the iPad in March.

Sure, they won’t be getting a lot of eyeballs for the goings-on around campus for those early editions, but it gives them time to work out what may be serious kinks that big name tech-savvy 1.0 pubs are also struggling with.

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“We pay close attention to the way young people consume news,”  ACU’s Kenneth Pybus, faculty adviser of The Optimist said in a press release.  “They tend to use all the tools at their disposal to get information.  With the new iPad, we definitely foresee the potential for an explosion in news consumption.”

What do you think, is “Optimism” justified?

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