As the quarter ends and The Observer prints our last issue until our January return, I felt a need to reflect on the businesses of the quarter.

Over the past two months, The Observer staff has covered a turbulent and constantly active news environment. Our reporters and editors wrote about the layoffs at CWU while also covering the budget outlook. We wrote about the continued COVID-19 pandemic and the outbreak that occurred in a residence hall.

We wrote extensively about the 2020 election and tried our best to cover the issues that would have the biggest impact on students and the broader community. We wrote about a verbal altercation that led to CWU shutting down a feature on a popular app.

We’ve covered ongoing Black Lives Matter protests as a racial reckoning continues in America. We wrote about changes to Title IX policy at colleges around the country and looked at how that will impact our campus.

There was never a time this quarter where our staff didn’t have enough content to write about. Even still, there are still more issues we plan on tackling in the future.

As our staff continues to grow and become more comfortable journalists we plan on tackling even bigger projects in the future, because there is still more to report. We plan on covering the 2021 legislative session, as Washington looks to handle an ongoing budget deficit.

Our staff will continue to cover the ongoing pandemic, and we will do our best to deliver readers the most relevant information. We will continue to cover CWU’s budget cuts, and how students will be affected. And when a new president is named, we will report on the impact it will have on the university going forward.

At the beginning of the quarter, I wrote while the staff was largely new, the mission of The Observer to deliver news that impacts students and the community will remain. While there are always areas where we can improve, I hope that we have met that mark in the reader’s eyes. We will continue to try not only to meet this standard in the future, but exceed it.

While this is The Observer’s final issue of 2020, I hope you will continue to follow our coverage until we return in the new year. We plan to continue to publish articles that impact students and the community alike on our website, and these will also continue to be available on our social media pages.