After touching our toes in the digital waters, The New England Journal of Higher Education is now taking the full dip. It’s a deep plunge driven by economic realities and the shifting preferences of readers, many who are “digital natives” as likely to read news and commentary on small screens as in print.

The New England Board of Higher Education will no longer publish a printed journal after the Winter 2010 issue, but pledges to offer real-time insights at a website to be relaunched in March 2010. The new integrated NEBHE website will feature “NEJHE Online” as its central focus and will capture ideas that have informed NEBHE’s historical interest in education and economic development.

The site will be dynamic—a “content hub.” We plan to feature: bylined commentaries and analyses, but refreshed more frequently than the old quarterly print schedule allowed; news and event listings, but refreshed more often than our biweekly Newslink allowed; and new dynamic content made available by digital technologies—web roundtables on pressing topics and videos and podcasts of NEBHE conferences and key events.

We’ll feature a slate of regular bloggers, including Boston University Dean Jay Halfond whose thoughts on higher education and the recession appear in the Winter 2010 print issue of NEJHE, and friends and frequent contributors Paul Harrington and Neeta Fogg of Northeastern University who have agreed to join us as regular bloggers on issues in access, retention and outcomes.

We’ll also continue to present the richness of our annual “Trends & Indicators” feature, but again updated more frequently.

Among the clichés of this brave new world: Content wants to be free. This new hub will expand our content to a broader audience, whether it is content we create or content we curate—something like what we’ve been doing for more than two decades, but liberated and enriched, we hope, by the more flexible, more frequent digital format.

As often attributed to Otto von Bismarck, laws are like sausages; it’s best not to see them being made. Though the same may be said of articles, the online presence will afford room to share some of the sometimes-illuminating back and forth that goes into writing and editing NEJHE articles.

It’ll be nice to work on a new canvas.