The Collegian recently published a really fantastic profile of boxer Katongo Mulenga, who is also a Penn State student. The writer, Dean Meyers, shadows Katonogo as he trains at the Altoona Boxing Club (without a coach) and competes in a fight at Uniontown.

The story is very well written, with atmospheric lines like:

Atlantic City is glitz and glamour. Altoona is, well, gloomy and glum.

This is a blue-collar city with crumbling brick factories. This is a town built around a now-defunct railroading industry. Nowadays, this is a city best known for its Double-A baseball franchise. This is where dreams come to die.

It’s a multimedia extravaganza, too. This story is the first one from the Collegian that approaches the kind of multimedia integration exemplified by newspapers like the New York Times. In this case, the structure of the Collegian’s website limits the effectiveness of the multimedia components. You can’t watch the video inline– they are only accessible by sentence long links within the story. The audio is worth a listen (I love how he thinks about his role as a boxer) but it’s hidden within the text of the story.