Doubling Down to Bring You the Best

The Campus has two contracts to uphold this year. A contract with you, the reader, and a contract to pursue the truth at all costs. We don’t write for Old Chapel. We don’t write for the Board of Trustees. We write for you, the Middlebury student.

This year, we have made slight changes to try and bring you more of what we think you want to read. The end result is a slimmer, sleeker paper with more graphics and less stories buried in the back of the paper just printed for the sake of printing.

As I move into the role of Editor-in-Chief this year, I plan to build on the work of past Campus leaders, but also shift the way we bring you stories. While we have expanded our coverage online, we are also trying to shift the way we write. That means less of the usual drab facts and figures, and more of the personal stories behind what is making news.

The media industry is rapidly changing, as newspaper giants like Washington Post and Boston Globe get sold for pennies of what they were once bought for. Gone are the huge investigative teams that helped exposed scandals like Watergate and in are the number-crunching interns tweeting at the speed of light. Print circulation is down in almost every market across the country as media companies switch to online. Many pundits beg the question of whether there will even be physical newspapers in a decade.

Far from accepting defeat, we are fighting this decline in newspapers by doubling down on our time and financial investment in both our print edition and across other mediums. We are continuing our Facebook page, along with bolstering our use of Instagram to provide content we can’t fit in the print edition. Finally, this year we are venturing out into the radio medium. Each week, the editorial board will collectively choose the week’s most interesting story from across different sections, and then broadcast that story over WRMC every Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. in a roundtable approach that goes beyond just the story. The radio show might interview students and administrative leaders about the use of cameras on campus one week, and then host a band that was reviewed in the paper followed by a live performance the next.

Coming from a long line of journalists, and lawyers who defend them,  I am troubled  think that my kids might grow up and not know what a printed copy of a New York Times looks like. But while most papers struggle to break even—let alone turn a profit—The Campus is lucky to be in a unique position. Through the generous funding of the SGA, we are able to print 1,700 free copies weekly for the Middlebury community, along with a full-color sports magazine once a year. Our hope is that we can be a dependable source for not only what’s happening, but also the personal stories you can’t find anywhere else. So pick up a copy every Thursday, and here’s to newspapers.