Please, read this newspaper

If you thought you and your friends kept up a lively group chat this summer, you should have seen ours.

The flurries of texts we exchanged from the desks of our respective Vermont internships were filled with high-intensity punctuation (!), lots of CAPS and the occasional weird YouTube video. Out of those electronic brainstorms came some of the ideas we so enthusiastically curated for this first issue, from Emma Brown’s map project on the front cover to our new classifieds page. (There were also plenty of ideas we scrapped before getting to campus, too, but we don’t have to talk about those.)

All three of us came to the Campus at a time when the paper was coming into its own. Cumulatively, we’ve worked for a total of five sections, under three editors in chief and four managing editors. We’ve hashed out our collective mission numerous times, and spent what can only be described as an ungodly amount of hours in our little basement office. This paper matters a lot to us. 

As does the practice of ethical journalism, to which we have dedicated our time off campus as well. We’ve spent summers reporting in newsrooms across the state, all the while taking lessons from Vermont’s professional journalists and exposing ourselves to pockets of the local community that we could hardly probe as students. Many others on our board have done the same.

Past Campus leadership teams have set us up for success in important ways — establishing greater community trust, taking on projects that matter and focusing on quality of content. For those efforts, we’re grateful. 

Now, we hope to bring new direction and creative energy to the work we do here, which is why we’re thinking of new ways to engage our readership across our digital and print platforms. The editors of this newspaper have built close, human relationships with faculty, administrators and other students. We value those relationships immensely hope to leave our successors with these same levels of trust, long after we’ve had our last bite of layout-night Green Peppers pizza.

In brief, we want you to want to pick up this paper. We think it’s pretty cool and we hope you do, too.