During last week, while the student body was mourning the lack of a fresh, new Campus Times, the news section was hard at work drawing up a new page two – it was outdated and inefficient for many reasons – most importantly, there were very few things taking up a lot of room. The masthead, which lists all the people who commit their Wednesday nights – or their lives – to the CT took over the entire left side, and the weather was up top just below a quote from some article farther inside the paper.
My coeditor Matt and I got to take a good look at how page two is used by our readership. We found that it is often the most read page in the paper, in large part due to the Campus Briefs and the Security Update. So, drawing on what people like to read – short, informational pieces – we decided to make page two a place to easily access lots of different information.
This information no longer includes the weather – I’m sorry to those of you who look to the CT every morning in search of the daily forecast. However, in its place we have added two new features: the calendar and the announcements.
The calendar is a combination of a news and events calendar and the already-existing arts and entertainment calendar formerly found in the A&E section. In the new calendar, students can easily access information about the upcoming week’s performances, lectures, deadlines and other events relating to student life.
The announcements section is a place for all of the different departments on campus to be able to communicate with students. In this place will be announcements from Dining about changes to service hours or from Parking reminding students about days they won’t be checking meters or from Security about service changes. The main difference between the calendar and the announcements is the calendar is for a one-day, one-time event, while announcements don’t have much of a start or an end.
We have, of course, kept the Campus Briefs and the Security Update but now place them differently on the page with different titles. The Security Update no longer has new headlines for every item in the update, instead there are dropcaps to signify where a new entry begins. The masthead has also been redesigned to be more stylish and yet leave us with more space.
With the addition of these two sections it is our hope that we can consolidate all of the different happenings on campus into one easily read reference page. However, it is impossible for us to know everything about every single event on campus – we need help to be as informative as possible. As a result we have set up two email addresses, calendar@campustimes.org and announcements@campustimes.org. Please use these emails to notify us and update us on any information you would like to see printed on page two.
While we can’t promise to publish everything sent in, only through a partnership with the different organizations on campus can we thoroughly serve our readership.
Jarrett is a member of the Class of 2009.
