I need wire!

With the upcoming demise of asap (the AP's wire service for it's youth markets), it seems that we need to take a step back and think about exactly what college journalists need from a wire service.

At the ideal college paper, students create all the content for one of those worthwhile learning experiences that we hear all about. This means that theoretically, a college newspaper should have no need for a wire service.

But theory isn't practice. A college newspaper doesn't have the staff or budget to cover national issues, even if they are hugely relevant to campus life. There are plenty of topics that make the idea of a wire service useful. And if we circle back around to that whole learning experience idea: if you're planning to go into journalism as a career, you're going to need a concept of how a wire service works.

An added bonus is the idea that a newspaper might be able to at least earn back their wire expenditures with the value of their own material.

In the end, the real question is how to keep a college wire service functioning.