Guest Speaker: Dylan Smith

Today in class we had a guest speaker from the Tucson Sentinel, Dylan Smith. Mr. Smith is the current Chief Editor and Publisher of the Newspaper which is based solely as an online resource. Mr. Smith and a few of his colleagues branched out once the Tucson Citizen went under and decided to run an online print only newspaper that focuses mainly on local Tucson news along with other major news stories. The Tucson Sentinel is a nonprofit online news source. The majority of the staff at the Sentinel does work voluntarily and carry a second job to pay for all their expenses. The Sentinel receives around fifty percent of their income from website advertisements along with around another fifty percent from donations that come from fellow readers of the Tucson Sentinel. A few interesting notes I took from Mr. Smith’s presentation; one was how since The Sentinel is a nonprofit news source they are not allowed to specifically endorse any political candidates. As Mr. Smith puts it “we want to give our readers everything straight up. We don’t want to lie to them like Fox news.” In addition, Mr. Smith talked about how his website was one of the first in the country to break the news that Gabrielle Gifford’s was in fact still alive and not dead after she was shot. He went on to discuss how crazy that first week was for him as a reporter and all the coverage that he had to attend whether it was a court hearing or a hospital visit. It was nonstop. To visit the Tucson Sentinel click the following link. Tucson Sentinel