It’s no secret that I love print media. I would rather read a physical book than an eBook, and the idea of flipping through a magazine on the beach is still as exciting to me now as it was when I was 11 years old reading Tiger Beat and Bop (who remembers those?) With the amount of time I spend looking at a screen nowadays, anything that enables me to take a break from it is a win.
But to be honest, I don’t love reading print newspapers. I do actually prefer digitally consuming news – social media is slowly starting to become my source of news as the condensed formats of internet news prove to be both efficient and accessible.
But at the same time, I absolutely love the design of newspapers. I love laying out pages, figuring out different ways to juxtapose image and text, and improving typefaces or other graphic elements. I especially love laying out pages for The Stute, but due to the pandemic, we haven’t been printing issues since March 2020.
We’re planning to return to printing again in the upcoming Fall 2021 semester, which I’m genuinely very excited for. But I was contemplating printing on a biweekly basis instead of a weekly basis or rethinking our print production entirely. In a way, the pandemic has given us a trial run at what it’s like to not have our print issues. It’s been a huge learning experience, and the only thing I wish is that we knew in March 2020 all about digital distribution that we know now.
I like to speculate and in truth, I think the future of The Stute is digital. We are a technology school with plenty of resources to survive with digital distribution only. I mean, somehow we’ve survived the past year, and with the right preparation, I think a digital-only Stute could be incredibly impactful.
In 2018, The Polytechnic (student newspaper) of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ceased print production and transitioned to what they call “online-first distribution” in the form of their own coded website. I had a conversation last year with former Editor in Chief of The Poly, John Stotz, in which I learned that the decision was made due to print layout design being time consuming. Stotz explained their content didn’t change, but everything began to be published on their customized website they code and design themselves. While they recruit Computer Science students to help manage it, Stotz acknowledged that maintaining their own website without any underlying software or hosting site is risky, especially if something goes wrong.
The Stute’s website is hosted using WordPress, so we currently don’t have the pressure of editing our own coded website. But I see that as a top possibility of a direction The Stute can and will go in – our own coded website. It’s almost stupid not to do that, being that so many students at Stevens are studying Computer Science.
But it’s going to take time. Depending on when the decision is made to gradually eliminate print issues of The Stute, I believe it’ll take about 3-5 years to fully transition into digital-only content. It seems like a long time, but there’s a lot of things that will need to be sorted out, such as recruiting coders, archiving, maintenance, and promotion, just to name a few. It won’t be done during my time at Stevens, but I look forward to the day a new website for The Stute is launched in an effort to focus on digital distribution of Stevens news.
The Stute Editorial is an Opinion column written by the current Editor in Chief of The Stute to address and explain editorial decision making, discuss news and media issues, and develop a sense of trust and transparency between readers and members of The Stute.
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