We at The Guilfordian spend a lot of time in the Publication Suite, editing articles, having meetings, laying out the newspaper and working on the website. But on Oct. 30, 10 members of our Editorial Board left the Pub Suite and traveled to Philadelphia for the 2014 Associated Collegiate Press National College Media Convention.
At the convention, we attended sessions and critiques of our issues, hoping to learn ways to improve both our print edition and our website. We have returned with a plethora of ideas.
In our News section, we will be working on concision and delivering important stories and facts without the fluff. All of us are busy, so we want to get you the information you need as quickly as possible.
Every time we attend this conference, we are reminded of the uniqueness of our World & Nation section. This time, we received compliments on our section and how it reflects the values of our school. We want to make the section even better by making the stories more deeply connected to Guilford and covering the adventures of our students studying abroad.
The Features section brings you a variety of stories, from coverage of plays to hunts for the best places to get a burger. While we will continue to provide a variety of coverage, we also want to hear your stories. If you have a narrative you want to share, we want to print it. We would also like to offer a place for survivors and victims of sexual assault to speak. Hopefully, this will shed light on sexual assault in our community, but most importantly we want to share your voices and experiences.
Our Opinion section garners a lot of attention, but we still have room for improvement. We will be working on writing stronger and clearer headlines to reflect the strong opinions in the articles. We also want to invite you to write to us. If you have an opinion about something happening on campus or something we write about, write us a Letter to the Editor.
In our Sports section, we want to guarantee that you will not find typical, boring stories. Instead of a play-by-play of games, we want to give you features on our athletes and informed columns.
While we have already been committed to social justice, we learned how to better report on it. Instead of being preoccupied with presenting both sides of an issue, we want to focus on finding the truth of an issue and providing that instead. We hope to reflect how deeply passionate our community is about social justice.
In our layout department, we are consistently experimenting with new ideas. Our motto is “Try, fail. Try again, fail better.” We want our paper to be as visually appealing as possible and for you to enjoy reading our paper.
At the competition, our website placed seventh. We are extremely proud of this accomplishment, but we have many changes to make. Our Sports and Opinion sections are the most trafficked online, so we will be making them more easily accessible and more prominent. We also are going to add as many visual elements as possible to our website.
We have a lot of changes to make, but we promise that amid all of the changes, we will continue our dedication to providing you a newspaper that reflects our community.
