Leslie Armstrong
Editor-in-Chief
Hold this 16-page copy of issue 1, volume 47 of Excalibur in your hands. Give it a squeeze and tell me it doesn’t feel unhealthily skinny.
You are probably wondering why we are suddenly so stingy. You may even be wondering how many great stories faced the chopping block, as we strove to cram our content to fit this uncomfortable page count. You may feel jaded that the glory days of our once thick community newspaper have expired. The truth is, there is nothing to be sad about.
To old and new readers, you have arrived at a very interesting time in Excalibur’s history. In March, the Board of Publishers made a decision to invest in our website (yes, we have a website) by creating the position of an Executive Editor (Online) who acts as a separate Editor-in-Chief for the web. This means that whatever our current presence in print is, our web presence will double that.
If you love this publication, you will realize moving away from the print edition is a blessing in disguise. This applies to our readers and our volunteers.
To our readers, a better web presence means there are now more types of content than ever before. If you are going to miss the charm of print, think of the great things you will gain from web: the web offers embedded videos, list-based articles, and interactive timelines…the list goes on.
To our volunteers, this means journalism is becoming democratized. For any bloggers on campus, our website can now be the place for your authorship. Even more, anyone with a camera phone (which applies to most of you) can snap a photo or take a video of interesting, newsworthy things happening on campus. Sometimes it is not about the quality of the content; it is about being in the right place at the right time.
If you do not believe me, think about the majority of the content you watch on YouTube: cell-phone videos of student riots in Québec, of protesters in the streets of Aleppo, and of sloths crossing the streets in Columbia, holding up traffic. When everyday people fill in the blanks with information, and they post it on the web with no incentive other than their desire to share certain phenomenons, we know it is genuine. These moments are all valuable, and we need to place the content before the form.
The best part is that all of you can be part of this.
From here on out, I will try my best to refer to the web in the print edition. You’ll see it in our headers, in our twitter feed sidebars, in our video screen caps, and in our web exclusives. The journalism industry is in a transitional state: while we want to continue to cater to a print audience, web is the future of journalism.
Did you give this copy a squeeze and wonder where the rest of content ended up? Log on to excal.on.ca, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
