Andrew Phelps of The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University wrote a story about the Beacon’s fully-responsive HTML5 website, redesigned this year. 

The Berkeley Beacon, Emerson College’s 65-year-old independent student newspaper, mirrors a lot of professional newspapers: Its funding is in jeopardy; editors are (happily) overworked; the editorial board pisses off people in power.

But the Beacon is ahead of most professional media in another respect: Its new HTML5 website is responsive— meaning the same code gets reflowed into new shapes depending on the size of the reading device. The site is now fully mobile-friendly, the editors announced today, making it perhaps the first student newspaper in America with a responsive design.

Take note of the custom web fonts, abundance of white space, and large photos (which, by the way, grow and shrink responsively as you resize the browser window). Article pages are designed to let the reader focus on reading. How many professional newspaper sites can claim that?