By Sophia Schlegelmilch | Editor in Chief
Happy Fall, readers! I’m finally getting into the swing of the school year, and I hope you are too.
This past month has been an interesting one in the Observer newsroom. We are getting to know a new class of Journalism students as well as several new staff members and contributors. Continuity between semesters is always tricky to achieve, so I am absolutely thrilled that we have several staff members returning from last semester. In addition to our returning staff, we are lucky to have two new staff members joining our team this semester as well: Vanessa Roberto, one of two staff photographers, and Anna Allen, our new web editor.
One of the subjects that has been coming up the most in our meetings is our website. We are gearing up to stat publishing more of our stories online. I know that sounds unusual in 2019-going-on-2020, and I’ll admit that it is. Publishing online is easier said than done, and the transition doesn’t happen overnight, so finding a way to make it work for us has been on my mind for a while. We know that college students primarily get their news from online sources, so we want to deliver our content to our readers in the way that works best for them.
We already have a website, of course (www.mountobserver.com), but regularly updating it, especially with the kind of timeliness a newspaper requires, is a big job. Most online news sources, college or otherwise, are putting out their news with a much bigger staff than we have. Which brings me back to the subject of our web editor; we’re so fortunate that Anna joined our team this semester, and she has already been hard at work tuning up our website and preparing us to start publishing online.
What does that mean for our readers and the future of our paper? Well, for the foreseeable future we’ll still (happily) be publishing our print edition, but you’ll also be able to read our articles on our website. Our online archive will still be available on www.issuu.com/mountobserver, but it will be easier for web and mobile users to read our content directly from our site since articles will now be accessible on an individual basis. Speaking of accessibility, this change should also make our stories easier to access for those who use screen readers and other accommodations for visual impairment. We’ll also be able to post more content, since our website isn’t limited by space or by a monthly publication schedule.
The new feature I’m looking forward to most, though, is the ability to take submissions online. As I wrote in my last column, I love getting your contributions! Soon, there will be a one-stop submissions section on our site, where anyone can easily submit story ideas, articles, letters to the editor, photographs, artwork, and more. The ease of the online submission form combined with the freedom of a website means that we can now host all kinds of submissions in one place without worrying about running out of space.
So if you haven’t checked our website in a while (or ever before), be sure to visit to see what’s new, and keep an eye out for updates on our site as well as on our social media. We’re looking forward to showing you a new side of the Mount Observer.
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