Starting with the 2023-2024 school year, The Clarion will provide students with a weekly electronic newsletter in addition to a monthly print edition.
As a current staff member, I believe there was an obvious need for this change. This opens a lot of doors for the publication, if we utilize the e-newsletter format to its full potential.
After our editors made this decision, it was a bit of a shock to think we would depart from our normal biweekly schedule. You could always count on seeing fresh stacks of student-written news on campus every other Wednesday. The problem is that a significant number of people prefer to get their news and information in another way.
A majority of Madison College’s enrollment are young adults who were raised around technology, thus able to get their news from a variety of sources. Television, social media, smartphone applications and the likes. The quality of the news being offered on these platforms is a different debate, but at the end of the day, not as many young adults turn to printed news.
As a member of that age demographic, I understand the appeal of news in digital formats. My attention span is that of a small child. My peers and I crave things that are fast and easy to digest. I suppose after years of gazing into bright stimulating computer screens, even flipping through pages has become somewhat of a tedious task. An email newsletter checks all the boxes.
This change also makes for a higher quality print issue each month, transforming it into a showcase of our best work rather than the everyday coverage of whatever events occurred on campus in the past two weeks. With an increase to weekly frequency, readers will also be hearing a lot less about old news or events that have already passed.
In short, The Clarion is modernizing – a benefit to all parties involved aside from the printer. This shift will help our staff continue to spread information to a wider audience than ever before and in a much timelier manner.