As I turned to my keyboard to start writing this letter, the clock slowly started to tick past 3 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. No, I am not an insomniac, despite what the number of hours I sleep may imply. Tonight is just another night in the never-ending roller coaster that is the news cycle, and as the saying goes, the news never sleeps.
At the Occidental Weekly, we work seven days a week to make sure that any and every piece of news, from the controversial to the lighthearted, is covered as accurately and with as much depth as possible. If that means running off campus to cover an attempted arson late on a Friday night, or heading to Redlands for a crucial SCIAC soccer match, we will be there to tell you the story.
The staff spends long hours meticulously researching, writing and editing stories, and not simply out of a desire to expand our journalistic portfolios. We put in the time and effort because the students, faculty, staff and alumni of this amazingly active and engaged community deserve the most timely, insightful information possible.
At a time when the future of print journalism has been called into question, the Weekly is not merely surviving—it is thriving like never before. Our staff of over 60 students continues to grow, we have received an astonishing number of applications over the last year and our web traffic is at an all-time high. Most exciting, I can say confidently that plans to expand the paper will be implemented in the not-too-distant future.
But without the Occidental community, without the individual reader picking up a paper in the Marketplace on a Wednesday morning, none of this would be possible. The Weekly is not my newspaper. The Weekly is not the newspaper of 60 staff members. It is the newspaper of everyone in this community, which we will continue to reflect to the best of our abilities.
So, if there is story within our pages that you enjoy, share it through social media and word-of-mouth. If there is something that you believe we can improve, don’t hesitate to let the staff at the Weekly know. Or, even better, come write for us, and let your entire community know what news you believe is truly important.
