I’m proud to announce the Oregon Daily Emerald now has one more online property: Up Close, the Photo blog. To the tune of Boston.com’s The Big Picture and the Seattle Times’ Best Seat in the House, we’ll be expanding upon the number of images traditionally available in print and on our website by publishing the good ones that don’t make the cut (including the foul which granted Oregon a game-winning penalty kick last week): 

Personally, I think this makes a lot of sense. Daily Emerald photographers, including myself, shoot hundreds of images each week. Many of the good ones don’t make it to print, as we obviously have limited space to run content. Having a team photo blog, however, will be an excellent forum for all of us to showcase our work, as well as highlight some of the challenges we face making excellent images. As a kicker, the images will be a full, gorgeous 900 pixels wide.

Furthermore, this is the first of many upgrades I hope we’ll be making this fall. Everyone in the newsroom is already in love with Google Apps, and I hope the other digital upgrades I’ve got in mind are just as well received (although I got the classic, “Twitter is so stupid,” comment a few days back).