Smudged with dust and no longer hanging at an angle I would describe as anywhere near 90 degrees, a small wooden plaque has made its home on the south wall of my office since 1995.

Big white letters on the plaque read: “1995 Associated Collegiate Press Best of the Net, Second Place: Editorial Content, Iowa State Daily, Iowa State University.” A few lines below, we find out why the Daily nabbed this illustrious award nine years ago: “Given for excellence in the first competition for online publications.”

1995? The first competition for online publications? Is that really correct?

The Iowa State Daily Online Edition, along with most of its peer campus newspaper Web sites, has come a long way in the last short nine years. Gone are the days of endless scrolling through pages of unbroken, difficult-to-read text that seemed to stretch across and down, up and around, screen after screen.

If you browse through campus newspaper Web sites today, you’ll find an entirely new online landscape. There are interactive photo galleries, flashing advertisements, blinking animations, sound bytes, video clips, searchable archives and pop-up ads that were unthinkable in 1995.

Although the Daily was apparently at the top of the online game back in 1995, we haven’t, unfortunately, made our online edition much of a priority since then. We struggled to get ISU students to visit our Web site, mostly because our online edition consisted of a massive re-shoveling of the content students had already read each day in our print edition.

Well, folks, all of that has changed. We did it again — we redesigned your paper, only this time, it is our online edition rather than the newspaper itself. I encourage you to visit www.iowastatedaily.com and browse through our new Web site, complete with all the bells and whistles.

Although the Daily’s new Web site is certainly visually appealing, its beautification isn’t the only reason we decided to revamp it. Our new focus on the online edition reflects a trend in the convergence of mass media that was pushed forward by the events of Sept. 11 and the demand of the public to get breaking news up to the minute.

Web sites devoted to news received record-breaking hits on Sept. 11 and the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. According to Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute, MSNBC.com saw nearly 12 million unique users on the day the terrorist attacks occurred. Before Sept. 11, it only received about 3 million hits a day.

Even months after the attacks, news Web sites continued to have much higher traffic levels than they did before the events of Sept. 11. MSNBC.com now averages 4.5 million users a day; CNN.com gets 60 million page views a day, double its pre-Sept. 11 average.

Sept. 11 hastened along a process that was already occurring in offices and homes across America. Online news sites provided readers with breaking news that newspapers and even television could not.

We hope the Iowa State Daily Online Edition is a place you will turn more often for news, especially breaking news. Over the spring semester, we plan to offer online content you can’t find in the regular print version: more photo galleries, video and sound clips, online projects and other special features.

Send us an e-mail or two and let us know what you think of the new Web site. We’re always open to suggestions.

And who knows — maybe the Daily will even win another online award so I can take down the grimy 1995 version that’s about to come toppling down from my wall.

Nicole Paseka is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Onawa. She is the editor in chief of the Iowa State Daily.