Daily Egyptian begins new chapter

When we started the Weekender in the Spring of 2013 our goal was to present the news in a different way.

We wanted to highlight our designers and photographers in a way our traditional model did not always allow.

We aimed to provide longer, more in-depth news stories and features that could not be provided in a daily newspaper. We came out with a new three-section weekend edition of the Daily Egyptian. The three sections were News, Pulse and Sports.

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During the spring semester we featured a different Registered Student Organization each week. RSOs are an important part of any college campus and we wanted to highlight what these interesting groups were doing.

With the Weekender we were able to revamp the Pulse section of the newspaper with regular movie and music reviews; and in the Sports section we had the opportunity to write longer pieces on sports that sometimes get overlooked.

When we came to the fall semester, the plan was to grow the Weekender as much as possible and to tackle some of the stories we were not able to while we worked out the kinks in the process.

But we just didn’t have enough content and ads to justify running three sections, so we bumped it down to two. The Weekender was an experiment through which we produced some great content.

Unfortunately we have made the decision to end the Weekender with this issue.

Both commercial and student newspapers have cut days of print production recently as the news business continues to evolve.

With that the Daily Egyptian will continue to evolve. The DE has been fully supported by advertising, as is virtually every other commercial newspaper in the county, which puts constraints on what we are able to do. Although we haven’t lost money on the Weekender, it has not been the draw, or the profit we hoped.

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But when you come back in the spring, you will see a brand new Daily Egyptian. In keeping with that ideal, we will dive deep into our online presence.

Beginning Fridays this spring we plan to feature our e-Daily Egyptian (e-DE for short), a shorter, online-only newspaper. As much as we love print, we understand that our generation has adapted to receiving their news through technology, whether it be their iPhone, laptop or tablet.

Our social media outreach will also be wider than ever, and we’ll incorporate it in our print version as well. We are certainly not abandoning print, but utilizing all technology. The two are intertwined and can be used to benefit each other.

But we still need you in order to make this transition as smooth as possible. We are looking for input on what students on this campus want to see in the newspaper. We also want you to voice your opinions.

We will make every effort to have an Opinion page each day, and we encourage you to write letters to the editor and let your voice be heard.

We are also making strides to preserve the DE in the long term. On Dec. 2 the Undergraduate Student Government approved a $9 student publication fee to begin in the 2014-2015 school year, which should the Board of Trustees approve, will help fill in the gaps ad revenue cannot.

We understand now more than ever that we are accountable to the students, who have a monetary stake in the school newspaper. This is your newspaper, and we owe it to you to offer a Daily Egyptian that stays with the times.

We are approaching our 100-year anniversary, and as we celebrate our past we are also looking toward our future to see how we can keep the Daily Egyptian going for another 100 years.

We invite you to take advantage of the opportunities a student newspaper offers you. This 15,000 issue-circulation paper is not just our editorial board’s newspaper. It is not just our reporters’ newspaper. It certainly is not just our administration’s newspaper.

This is your paper, and we want it to be the best it can be.

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