This newspaper belongs to you. Being Students’ Association recognized, the Campus Times’ job is to keep the community up to date and to provide an outlet for students’ opinions, creativity and journalistic ramblings. As a new editorial staff will arrive next semester and a few assets here and there will undoubtedly change, this wonderful fact of life about UR’s student newspaper will remain intact forever.
I can’t say enough about the passion and the work ethic of our editorial staff. The weekly grind of producing a newspaper is surely not to be underestimated, and I give all of the credit of the quality of the CT to my fellow editors. With that being said, we could not do it without the rest of the University community, and it is to you that I dedicate this article.
During the past year, we have launched several new Web initiatives, which, while admittedly inconsistent, have shown a new direction for the future of the organization.
While we’ll always focus primarily on the printed-paper, new outlets like our blog, photo slideshow and podcast will grow under the next editorial staff. A redesign of our Web site has given us the ability to create and post digital media much easier than before.
For these ventures to succeed, however, we need support from the rest of the community. A constant struggle for our staff has been to find a steady stream of contributors for our online endeavors. There are many ways for anyone to get involved: submitting your cool photos for our weekly slideshow; becoming a blog columnist where students, alumni and the Rochester community can hear your views several times a week; even assisting us to maintain and improve our Web site, which is an often overlooked but extremely important aspect to further these creative ends.
In the future, the content of the paper will start to expand from the tightly knit community of River Campus to hopefully include more news about the Eastman School of Music and especially news from around the city of Rochester itself. We’re living in a city of over 200,000 people that has delicious food, shopping and culture. Many of us at school have been missing out on all of that. Also, there are many aspects of the city of Rochester politics that affect us, and it would be a disservice not to keep UR up to speed.
One aspect of the Campus Times that many students tend not to realize is how easy it is to get involved with the newspaper. There are no prerequisites to contributing. We accept articles from all class years (including graduate students), all majors and anything else that you can think of. There’s no interview or entrance exam and we’re even quite friendly, despite the unfortunate fact that our office looks more like a dungeon than anything else.
The success of the Campus Times relies not only on the efforts of our editorial staff but also on the insightful and dedicated articles, photographs and comics that we receive from the UR student body. In the spirit of the University’s motto, we are always working to make our organization better and always value the input of our readers. If you have suggestions or comments of any nature regarding any aspect of the CT, please come to the feedback forum on Wednesday at 5 p.m. in the Gowen Room of Wilson Commons, or contact me at publisher@campustimes.org.
Wasserman is a member of the class of 2010.
