By the Editorial Board
As the year comes to a close, The Skidmore News editorial board spent our last editorial meeting reflecting on our progress, accomplishments, and potential room for improvement. We are proud of the work we’ve done this semester to ensure Skidmore News’s relevancy to the Skidmore community.
This semester, we made a concerted effort to stay on top of relevant issues. We pushed ourselves to stay current and thought provoking, and we would like continue to be more successful in this endeavor next semester.
We responded vigorously to events on campus—for example, we live-updated the Skidmore News website during the lockdown when a criminal was on campus. We also published numerous articles in response to the dialogue surrounding sexual misconduct on campus. We made it our goal to stay connected to the students, and be the forbearers of on-campus news. This was reflected in the number of readers we gained—our readership went up significantly this year. Almost all of our articles published in March reached over 1000 views. Some of our highest view counts on recent articles are 3889, 3325, and 2449, and we average about 850 views per article.
Other big changes this year included our increase in leadership and our return to the print edition. We added members to our editorial board this semester, and switched editors-in-chief. We now have two EICs, who share the responsibilities of being editor. We also brought back the print edition of the paper, which we’ve published at the end of each month and distributed throughout campus.
Next semester, we’ll be switching up the types of pieces we’ll be writing. We’ll keep our Arts & Entertainment, Sports, and Pulp section, and will be dissolving the news and opinion section, with the goal being that all pieces will integrate news coverage and opinions. We’ll be adding a Student Life section, which will cover student club activity, SGA activity, and any notable student achievements. We will also include an Administration and Faculty section, in which we will cover policy and administrative changes, as well as faculty features and departmental news. Finally, we’re adding a National News Here section, which will cover national events that are relevant to Skidmore, and any Skidmore events that relate to national goings-on.
Additionally, beginning next semester, we plan on implementing some educational workshops that will be open for any students to attend. These workshops will cover reporting, writing, editing, and reviewing past material to see what could have been done better. We think this will be a great way to hone new writers’ skills, and improve the quality of our content.
We definitely have some room for improvement, though. Skidmore News would like to have published a larger variety of pieces throughout the past year. We also have not been on top of breaking news pieces, but rather have responded to pieces after they’ve already reached the public. The campus newspaper should be the source you hear news from first, so we’ll be making an effort to make sure that’s the case next semester. Similarly, we need more investigative pieces with thorough journalism on important topics.
On another note, our multi-media content has been lacking throughout the past year. We’d like to be producing videos and graphics alongside written pieces and we hope our new art directors will make this happen.
So, while we have done a strong job this year, we certainly have more work to do semester. We would love to publish an even wider range of pieces and we hope to continue to push the envelope even more in the upcoming semesters. In order to do so, we need more members of the community to come forward and join our team. We encourage you to stop by our meetings next year, Monday nights at 9 pm in the Newsroom.