Like any student organization on campus, the McDaniel Free Press undergoes various shifts between school years—for this year, we are working to implement a variety of improvements in the areas of multimodality, online presence, outreach, and our organizational meetings, among other goals.
The Free Press has traditionally been focused on solely written journalism, but we now seek to continue moving beyond this sole focus. We have integrated photo essays in our content for quite some time, but we seek to improve and expand this. More photos will be seen on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. To aid this, we’ve also created a new Free Press Flickr account.
Furthermore, we are hoping to feature more videos as part of our content. This is part of our larger goal to make our posts more multimodal. We even hope to be integrating audio through Spotify and Soundcloud embedding.
As made clear by now, we are beginning to place more priority on our online presence. This is a process that largely began last semester, with the creation of a Free Press Instagram in addition to the highest level of social media activity the Free Press has had in its entire history. This semester, we seek to amplify this.
Our website has also undergone maintenance over the summer, though we will be working to improve the organization of content and improve faulty and visually inadequate elements. The website’s functionality has begun to be improved, with easier navigation paths and the like. In the future, we will be looking into the potential for digital access to our print editions beyond each individual article.
As an organization and publication, we are going to seek more outreach to McDaniel and beyond. If all goes well, we could potentially host events open to all members of the McDaniel community, such as talks with individuals involved in professional journalism. The Free Press wants to have a presence at more events and more places of McDaniel, so as to spread the word of our publication as well as integrate a wider array of viewpoints.
We are hoping to conduct more class visits beyond classes who plan to submit content to us—if all goes well, editors will briefly outline the Free Press to classes that fall in line with what our paper does, and seeks to do.
We are furthermore striving to promote more dialogue between students and administration. As part of this, we will likely be starting a column in which we take student rumors to administrators for comment.
As a final major point, our meetings as an organization will be transformed. Not only will meeting times become for efficient and practical, but we are also going to hold a variety of meeting types. These range from regular budget/brainstorming meetings, to workshops and discussions, all of which are open to all students. Our editors will also be continuing to hold office hours every week. During these times anyone will be welcome to visit our office in Hill 111.
We encourage everyone to attend any of our meetings, regardless of their experience or how much content they are comfortable committing to. Regular email updates regarding meetings and other paper matters will be given to students on our email list. Office hours and meeting times will be announced in the next week.
Be on the lookout for great things from the Free Press this year!
