New quarter, new EIC, new Observer

eic

I am honored to introduce myself to you, dear readers, as the new editor-in-chief (EIC) of The Observer.

This quarter will be my first go at being the EIC for this paper, but you may recognize my name from my time spent as editor of the Scene section last quarter, and assistant scene editor the quarter before that.

I have grand plans for helping The Observer grow and evolve, especially in the direction of online. We’re hoping to expand our online content, hold it to higher design standards, and get the news out faster.

To further this goal, we are attempting a new schedule that will focus more heavily on timely online content. The staff and I are still ironing out the kinks, but we’ll get there. The goal is to have fresh content posted online everyday.

Personally, I’m most excited about our new student art submission page.

Every week, we’ll add accepted submissions to the new Art page.

Submittable art can be anything from short stories to photos of sculptural pieces, barring anything that’s against our rules.

The art submissions don’t stop at visual representations. We can accept multimedia works, such as music, film, video games and more.

Multimedia works will get featured on our website, embedded on the page with links back to the original posting. As long as your media is posted to a free viewing site (and follows all rules and guidelines) we can feature it.

Students who are interested can see the facing page and submission guidelines through the link offered there.

Another exciting artistic addition to the paper is our new weekly comic, “Brainery Blurbs,” by Ean Zelenak.

The comic strip will be about campus life, as the name subtly implies. “Brainery” means college or university, according to Dictionary.com. I hope everyone begins to look forward to the comic as much as I do.

My most important goal this quarter, above all others, is to continue producing a quality paper each week and improve on the quality as we go.

To do this, we need help from readers like you. It might sound like a clichéd call to action on your part, but it’s actually a very important part of the learning process our reporters go through.

We need our readers to talk to us. Email us when you spot factual errors, have an idea for a story, or would like to submit your own opinion piece for this page.

Everyone on The Observer staff is a student, and we need our readers’ critiques to learn what we’re doing wrong and to better ourselves.

Instructors frequently comment on our design of the week, adherence to AP style or grammar errors, but if readers don’t tell us we’ve made other mistakes (misspelled names, reporting errors, etc.) then we’ll never know we made them.

Consider it a peer review exercise and involve yourself in our learning experience by commenting on our main website and social media sites, and by writing us emails and opinions.