As the breeding ground of legendary newspapermen like Jack Tarver, Buford Boone and Reg. Murphy, Mercer has a long tradition of strong journalism. Pretty soon, we’ll be finally catapulting that tradition headfirst into the digital age with a transition that has been long overdue.

We’re just three days away from debuting MercerCluster.com, a new website that will provide Cluster readers an online platform to consume both traditional and non-traditional news content. But converting a time-honored newspaper at a historic college into a successful digital product has not been an easy or a straightforward task, nor can we expect it to be in the future.

This blog will chronicle the efforts of our small student biweekly to rise to the challenge of the digital age. It will tell the story of an old school embracing new media, documenting how a small but dedicated group of student journalists are figuring out how to tailor their product to the Web with limited resources and even more limited time constraints.

We have a lot ahead of us if we want to be successful, and it’s going to require us to master CSS and WordPress just as much as we have memorized AP style rules in the past. But we don’t have any other option if we want to keep up with the present and continue fulfilling our public duty to inform students.

-Carl V. Lewis, The Cluster‘s first web editor