Dear Readers,
We are so happy to be starting out the 2021-22 school year so strong. Already, we have reported on campus dining halls closing, discussed protests around hateful anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric on The Plaza, brought you the most up-to-date sports, music and arts coverage and even taught you about fun cannabis products.
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If you don’t keep up with the trials and tribulations of being a journalist in this day and age, you might not know that print journalism is dying. The number of newspapers that print a daily paper has fallen by 28% in the last 50 years. Over 300 newspapers in the United States closed in 2020, taking away the jobs of journalists, editors, photographers and designers everywhere.
As The Collegian attempts to stay afloat in a print news world that is sinking, we have to change the way we do journalism to better suit an audience that is digital-first. We tailor our content to online, as we know most of our readers are students walking to class and pulling up our website on a mobile device. But we also recognize the importance of a print paper that you can pick up and flip through the pages of, and we’re refocusing our content to better serve a weekly audience.
We ask that you, the readers, remember we are doing this not just for the love of community journalism but also to continue providing readers with relevant content all week long while giving students the educational opportunity of getting to create a print paper.”
For this reason, The Collegian is now an alternative-weekly, that is, a newspaper that only prints once a week. This changes the way we write our content. We search for stories that will be fresh and interesting for an entire week while the paper sits on stands. It is why we made the tough decision to take weekly coverage of City Council and Associated Students of Colorado State University meetings out of print and replace them with more evergreen stories.
It changes the way we design our paper, as we recognize the visuals and cover have to be even more interesting and attention-grabbing. Internally, it changes the way we produce our newspaper and how our staff runs. It’s an exciting time but also a scary one.
We ask that you, the readers, remember we are doing this not just for the love of community journalism but also to continue providing readers with relevant content all week long while giving students the educational opportunity of getting to create a print paper. Having the opportunity to write a story for print, design a page, place a photo, create the cover, copy edit a page or plan a special edition are all invaluable experiences. Plus, nothing bonds friends more than sending a paper to print together, knowing you’ll never get it back and thousands of copies of your work will be distributed the next day.
We ask for the support of readers in this transition, and we hope to see more readership and engagement with this change.
Katrina Leibee, editor in chief
Serena Bettis, content managing editor
Devin Cornelius, digital and design managing editor
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The editorial board can be reached at editor@collegian.com or on Twitter @CSUCollegian.
