NINA COSDON, ALINA PANEK, ROHAN ARORA, Head Editors—Hello! We’d like to introduce ourselves as the new head editors of The Densionian. Nina Cosdon and Alina Panek are the new Editors-in-Chief and Rohan Arora is serving as Managing Editor.
As we begin the spring semester, we thought the best way to usher in a new Denisonian staff would be to integrate new approaches to facilitate the transition for new editors and to make writing for and reading the paper as accessible as possible for all students.
We hope to achieve this through three initiatives:
- We want to cultivate more of a community for the staff through the beginning of the semester by organizing staff training sessions and events.
- We want to support the most effective teamwork by outlining position responsibilities and streamlining editor-writer communication. Writers are just as important to our team as editors and should be recognized as such.
- We want to create outreach; we would like to focus on our digital content, by increasing our presence on social media, thereby creating wider access to our content through our website and recently developed newsletter.
The Denisonian is one of the oldest communities on campus. As a team, we would like to work on building the community within the newspaper.
We want to make sure that everyone feels confident in their skills that are needed to continue production of the high quality that our previous editors have maintained.
For example, we led a beginning-of-the-volume meeting where we did introductions, covered responsibilities and brainstormed new directions for us to follow for the first week of the semester.
The idea of community is especially important when considering that The Denisonian as an organization is one of many smaller communities that exists on Denison’s campus. As editors we would all like to continue to use this platform we have been given to foster the constructive conversation good journalism always strives to spark.
As a new team, we would like to introduce new ways to foster improved communication and writer-editor relationships. As experienced editors, we have noticed that writers will often ghost us if they do not want to write anymore.
We would like to facilitate how writers are communicating with their editors. We have some ideas—such as collecting people’s phone numbers and getting into section teams at the end of every content meeting.
Lastly, one of our strengths in our last volume was mobilizing digital platforms for our stories. We made major improvements, such as stories on social media and a weekly newsletter, delivered via email.
We are committed to continuing this growth by adding staff positions, such as graphic designer and social media editor so that we can continue to improve in readership and efficacy.
In essence, we want to make sure that this editorial board brings as much joy to you as it has to us.
We recognize that as editors of the paper, it is our responsibility to ensure we succeed in creating and growing an accurate, factual paper but we are also invested in growing our team, with fun integrated at all opportunities.As our readers, we’re hoping that you could help us out by writing to us. We would love to hear what is working, what isn’t, and any story ideas that you think is Denison Community worthy!