The news world is evolving every day. It has gone from word of mouth to print, radio, television and now websites and social media. To survive in the news industry, media companies have to evolve with the ever-changing technology.

“That’s just how the evolution of media has gone that people are consuming it in different ways than they use to. As a news organization we have to either embrace that or die,” The Vicksburg Post’s photographer Justin Sellers said.

At The Post, Sellers and reporter Austin Vining spend a portion of their day posting information to the newspaper’s website and social media sites.

“As reporters, our job is still the same, to gather and report information. What has changed is the number of ways our readers are able to access that information,” Vining said.

Social media is now an integral part in how news organizations disseminate information to the public and it has become one of the best ways to garner new audiences.

“We have to draw in new readers and the best way to do that is through the Internet,” Sellers said.

The Post’s digital content is overseen by Vining who makes sure all the articles are accessible through the online platforms. The website, vicksburgpost.com, is updated daily with all the news, sports, opinions and obituaries from the day’s print edition. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are the three social media sites The Post utilizes.

“Social media is a tool to help us ensure that our content gets in front of as many readers as possible. At the end of the day, that’s one of our biggest focuses,” Vining said.

The paper also offers a daily Portable Document Format or PDF digital edition of the paper to subscribers called the EPost. The EPost allows readers to flip through the full pages of the entire paper online.

“We try to make it easy for people who live out of town or want to pick and choose the news they get from us. Out-of-town subscribers or those who prefer to surf their news digitally can subscribe to our digital newspaper or browse our website,” Vining said.

Vining and Sellers both said uploading content to the web does not take a lot of time, usually less than hour and is only a minor portion of their day.

“It adds a few extra minutes to my day, but not a whole lot, definitely much less than getting stuff ready for print,” Sellers said.

After Sellers takes photos he spends a good portion of his day editing and toning the pictures as well as writing the cutlines that describe what is happening in the photo.

“I spend at least as much time editing as I do shooting pictures,” Sellers said. “Sometimes it may be two hours to every one hour as far as ratio of editing to shooting.”

He manages the photos for the print version of the paper first and then he works on editing the dimensions of the photos for the website. Full size photos can weigh the website down making it load slowly.

“You have to find a balance of retaining the image quality while also allowing the website to run properly,” Sellers said.

Once that process is complete he then decides which images will be posted to Instagram or if he is going to post an album of photos to Facebook.

“Just since I started here a few years ago we’ve made a pretty dramatic shift towards the Internet and social media,” Sellers said.

Social media gives Sellers an outlet the traditional paper does not always allow. Through Instagram he has more creative leeway and can post artsy pictures, which may not translate as well in print. These photos may not be particularly newsy, but rather are beautiful images found in the events of daily life.

On Facebook, Sellers can set up full galleries of photos for the public to see multiple images the physical edition does not have space to print.

“In a newspaper you can get one to maybe three pictures of something in the newspaper because you have a finite amount of space, but on the internet you have pretty much an infant amount of space that you can put your content on,” Sellers said.

He has found people are excited to see pictures of themselves and their loved ones in the newspaper and online, and using Facebook has allowed him to get more of those images out into the public eye.

“It’s a cool thing to be able to take a picture that winds up being really important to somebody,” Sellers said.