Starting with this issue, printed copies of The Picket will be released on a bi-monthly basis instead of every Wednesday. Instead of releasing a weekly roundup of news as we have done in the past, we at The Picket are moving into the digital age and will be publishing stories as they happen on a nearly daily basis on supicket.com.
Changing our focus to digital content gives us more independence, as we will not be bound to a printer’s schedule. It gives us more relevance as we are able to share news with the community when it matters. It also gives more editorial freedom. In the event that a mistake is published, it can be corrected immediately on our website, while there would be a week between corrections if we were publishing weekly as before.
Along with our daily updates on supicket.com, The Picket is also increasing our presence on social media; we are @supicket on Twitter and @supicketgram on Instagram. Contacting us at either of those outlets will immediately get our attention, and using the hashtag #PicketToday on Twitter or Instagram will also work. Social media allows The Picket to interact with students on a more personal level, which not only leads to more student-driven content, but also allows us to reach a wider audience.
Our whole staff has been posting stories and pictures from around campus every day. Sharing the social media responsibilities allows us to cover more than any one person assigned to the job could. Posting pictures of occurrences on campus and announcing event times allows us to cover things that may not merit an entire article but still deserve attention.
The Picket has been working with this new model, posting stories on our website and social media for the past two weeks, and we have seen a significant increase in reader response.
Our motto states that we are the student voice in the university community. Shifting our publication style only serves to expand upon that claim by becoming a daily factor of life in the community.
This new publication model will also allow us to provide a more polished hard copy. The Picket is put together by a small staff, and designing a 16-page newspaper every week can be very difficult and has led to careless mistakes in the past. Publishing every two weeks gives us the time we need to ensure a quality hard copy and provide the community with the most fully developed stories possible.
Along with our expanded Internet presence, we are also making an effort to provide more comprehensive coverage of police, student government, administration and town news every week. We feel that many such subjects have not received the coverage that they merit in the past, and we have taken immediate action to remedy that.
We have not decided to abandon our print publication, as it has been a part of The Picket since the beginning, but these are changing times and we encourage readers to visit supicket.com for the latest news daily.