This semester Cardinal & Cream will pursue a longstanding goal through new technologies.
Our paper is going digital.
One of the core purposes of journalism is to engage in and further relevant conversation. It’s hard to be relevant with a publication that comes out every other week, as we used to. This semester we have already begun updating our website daily with new content, focusing our efforts online.
However, plenty of people love the feel of paper in their hands. Because of this, we have decided that the Cardinal & Cream newspaper will become a news magazine, coming out once a semester.
This change will allow us to spend time focusing on creating a magazine with stunning visuals and in-depth stories.
We at the C&C believe these two efforts will allow us to best fulfill the purposes of student journalism.
The C&C is a student-run publication. Students pitch, write and edit stories, shoot photos, create graphics, sell advertisements and lay out pages with the guidance of two faculty advisers. Some do so for class credit, others as a job and others simply out of a love for journalism and stories.
While we work on the paper for a myriad of reasons, our ultimate commitment is to serving this campus.
In their book “The Elements of Journalism,” Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel stated that journalism must provide a forum for voices in all parts of a community. In our case, this means we provide a forum for voices across Union — including students, faculty, staff and alumni.
“Journalism is storytelling with a purpose,” Kovach and Rosenstiel wrote. “The purpose is to provide people with information they need to understand the world.”
We at the C&C want to further understanding of different parts of the Union community. Sometimes we seek to do so by sharing interesting stories that broaden readers’ imaginations or allow people to dream, such as telling the story of a student who summited Mt. Kilimanjaro this summer.
Other times, we seek to further understanding by delving into complex and poorly understood issues, as we did in our 2013 article about pregnancy on campus.
As a reader, you can expect and demand transparency from the C&C. You can also expect and demand a commitment to accuracy.
We will make mistakes along the way, but know that we have a desire to serve and better the Union community and to strive for excellence.
As journalists, we also have expectations of our readers. We crave your feedback. If you have questions about stories, wonder why we chose to publish an article, think we could have done something better or think we have done something well, we hope you will let us know.
Furthermore, we hope readers will also share story ideas with us. We want to tell the stories that matter to people at Union. No one can do that better than our readers themselves.
Ultimately, our hope is that we will not serve the Union community by acting alone. Rather, we want to partner with everyone who clicks on our website or picks up a copy of our magazine.
Please join us as we learn and share your stories.
