It’s finally here: the last Trail issue of the semester. Next week is reading period, the following week we are tested on what we learned during reading period and the week after that—who knows? Some of us will graduate. Some of us will watch our friends graduate. Some of us will watch The Graduate on Instant Netflix and ignore phone calls from our parents asking if we’ve found a job yet.
In the beginning of the year, I wrote a short article—what I proudly called “The State of The Trail Address,” perhaps hoping it might become some sort of the tradition—and tried to lay out as best I could where I thought the paper was and where I wanted it to go. Now, as the year draws to a close, I thought it might be appropriate to provide…well, a little closure.
So let’s talk about what The Trail has been up to this year. We celebrated our 100th birthday in the fall, spending the first semester launching a new website (trail.pugetsound.edu) and also “looking back” at the previous hundred years of our newspaper in a special section of our print edition (featuring old articles, photos, advertisements, nostalgia, etc.) This was all somewhat new territory, as we had never turned 100 before and never really launched a real website before either. I’m so proud of our staff for jumping on board with these goals, and I’d like to thank you, our readers, for providing such valuable feedback and helping make our website what it is today.
And what exactly is our website today? First, some numbers: We’re averaging about 200 daily hits and we spike up to about 600-900 hits on Fridays, with heavier traffic in general over the weekend. For a small school, that ain’t bad—and the traffic keeps climbing! To put it in perspective, we received 80 hits total for the month of September, but then 2,405 hits for October. We are now at around 8,000 hits for April, our highest ever. This is extraordinary, because it means you, our readers, are finally getting to interact with your paper in the ways you want. Before we went online, readers’ opinions were limited to how much space we had on our Opinions page (as letters to the editor). Now, over 160 comments have been posted on our online articles this year by readers who have opinions, ideas, or passionate reactions to our content. I can’t thank you enough for your continued interest and support, and for actively engaging with your school newspaper. Thank you!
I’d like to touch upon these ‘passionate reactions’ and about how much I value our readers who hold The Trail accountable to our own standards. As editor, I get the pleasure of hearing positive, supportive responses from our readers as well as frustrations about our content (perceived bias, factual errors, failure to cover certain stories, covering other stories too much, etc.) Some of these are written as letters to the editor; some are posted online (occasionally anonymously with a degree of venom that so easily comes with the territory of anonymous internet comments). I thought it would be appropriate to, as I leave you as editor (and hopefully graduate in a few weeks), respond to some of these concerns and share with you a little about your newspaper and how hard we work to provide engaging, entertaining, relevant, accurate and balanced content.
The Trail is entirely student-run, without the guidance and instruction of a university journalism program. The situation is a little tricky, in that our staff—all full-time students with heavy academic work loads—must meet the rigor of weekly deadlines while concurrently learning about what journalism is and how to write it. Part of our mission statement is that we seek to provide students with the chance to learn these skills on the go, but it also means that mistakes will invariably occur. Our policy is to address these as they happen by running corrections and always continuing to strive to do the very best we can to cover stories honestly and with respect. I would kindly ask our readers to remember that your Trail writers are your peers (in fact, you could easily apply to be a writer yourself!), and that any disagreement you might have with an article should not be voiced as personal attacks against individual student writers. As The Trail continues to grow and writers continue to learn the tenants of strong, balanced journalistic writing, we hope our readers might equally take advantage of opportunities to learn how to engage respectfully with their paper. Civilized discourse can be difficult sometimes (particularly when we feel we have been hurt), but it is our shared obligation to learn how to learn from each other. That’s part of what Puget Sound is all about.
So what is The Trail and where are we headed? We are a student-run weekly newspaper and we strive to provide students, faculty and the community with content they will find informative and engaging. Our writers are required to think critically and respectfully about stories they cover (the role of a newspaper cannot be to simply plug events). On the other hand, we must not fall into the error of thinking a critical article is necessarily a ‘journalistic’ one, and we are so thankful to our readers who continue to push us to think critically about our own work.
We are not a university bulletin, or an extended advertisement for events, or a complete and perfect record of all that happens on campus. And we don’t try to do those things. We are a newspaper and, more importantly, we are your newspaper.
Thanks for an amazing year everyone, and happy reading!