Blogging about the news business these last few years, it'd be easy to become jaded. Too many good reporters laid off. Too many newsrooms gutted. Too many greedy and/or shortsighted publishers, period.

But when I'm not writing for this website I'm running the journalism program at Bucks County Community College in the suburbs north of Philly. "Running" is a glorified way of saying I teach four courses a semester in the basics of reporting, writing, editing and so on.

I'm also the faculty adviser to the student newspaper, the Centurion.

And that's where things get interesting, because while the prophets of the digital media age would have us believe that newspapers are about to go the way of eight-track tapes, and that young people in particular couldn't care less about newsprint, what I've found is just the opposite - young people who absolutely love putting out a paper.

A little background: My students are middle- and working-class kids. By and large they haven't gotten the kinds of breaks that the students at Princeton, just 20 minutes away, have gotten. Nearly all of them work, many full-time, in addition to taking classes. Some find it tough to pay the college's tuition, cheap as it is.

And so it's always a struggle to find enough students to publish the paper, given the demands on their time. And yet the paper comes out, anywhere from five to 10 times a semester, year after year, all due to a small but enormously dedicated group of students who discover the thrill of seeing their bylines in black ink on gray newsprint.

They write all the articles, headlines, captions and cutlines. They edit the stories and lay them out on the page. Pictures? More often than not they're shot with someone's cellphone camera. Distribution? When the papers come back from the printer, everyone grabs a stack or two and lugs them out to one of the campus newsstands. I offer advice and proof the final pages, but it's their paper. They own it, and it's their pride in ownership that's infectious.

None of this, by the way, has anything to do with money, because the students nearly all work for free. A few editors qualify for some work-study funds, and we have a little scholarship money to sprinkle around. But it's a pittance, given the hours they put in.

And what's really amazing is this: Much of the time they do a damn good job. The news copy is generally tight, the layout clean and crisp. We've had some knockout features and our share of tragic breaking news stories, like the female student who worked as a stripper for extra money and was murdered by one of her customers. We covered that one from the discovery of the body to the sentencing of the killer.

The paper isn't perfect. Some stories could be more thoroughly reported. Misspellings and errors sometimes get past us.

But it's a student paper. To me that means this: The reporters and editors should always do the best job they can. And they should also be given some leeway to make mistakes. That's how they learn.

Occasionally someone who works at the college will forget this, and complain about some typo or mistake. I've been known to growl at these people, loudly. They usually don't complain again.

The highlight of the year is when we enter the annual statewide college journalism contest, the Keystone Press Awards, run by the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association. The staff is always eager to see how their work stacks up against other student papers.

Recently we learned that the Centurion had won 11 awards, more than any other two-year college paper in Pennsylvania. I was thrilled and congratulated the editor, Ian, a no-nonsense 20-something who, when he isn't running the paper, works at a local car dealership.

He was underwhelmed. "Yeah, it's okay," he told me, adding that he thought we could have done better in the contest's layout category.

I told him he should be proud, that the awards were a recognition of the paper's quality under his leadership for the past several semesters.

But he was having none of it. Got to get back to work, he said. There was, after all, a paper to put out.

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