Strong Start to the Semester

Kudos to The Orion news and video staff members who jumped on stories big and small to start the new semester!

Some highlights:

* Liz Coffee and others were on the scene of Friday night's "disturbance" (if it quacks like a riot...) and provided pics and Tweets from the scene.

* New Video Editor Jeff Barron changed things up nicely with the daily webcast, letting the pictures do the talking in a segment that highlighted sights and sounds from last week. He followed that up with a nice feature about fire spinner Jack Ober.

* Bill Hall was all over opening ceremonies on Aug. 22 with live tweets from the $2 million ag scholarship announcement and President Zingg's opening convocation.

* Sharon Martin provided Twitpic coverage of welcome week activities, the sort of photo I was pushing hard last year as a way to a) provide fresh art for theorion.com home page every day and 2) capture images of the typical as well as the newsworthy and c) get more photos of students in the paper/website/app.

* Bill Hall and Dan Reidel posted a story, photo and video of the fatality Tuesday afternoon when a tree limb fell on a Chico State student. Dan added still more coverage by collecting elements into a Storify post. 

* News Editor Nick Carr deserves credit for many of these efforts as the guy directing traffic and making sure @theorion_news was retweeting to its audience.

I couldn't be prouder of the effort and all of you!