A great newspaper reflects the population it serves, and that is the year’s goal.
We’re in a very important year for students. Local and gubernatorial elections will determine the agenda for higher education that shapes every student’s college experience.
In light of the upcoming races, we’ve assembled a full team of reporters to cover the local and gubernatorial races. You can expect thoughtful and in-depth reporting on higher education issues on the campaign, as well as thorough and unbiased coverage of breaking election news.
We are devoting entire news pages to running a voters’ guide next month that will feature interviews with candidates about their stances on local and educational issues, which will remain online for the duration of the election season.
Despite all this, we’re certainly not ignoring the student body and the issues it holds dear. The website is an area where you will see drastic changes.
We are implementing a full redesign of the site that should be up and running in about a month. Thousands of new students flood the campus each year who don’t know the full history of campus and city issues. We will have timelines, pictures, short biographies and extensive explanations of some of the most important issues on campus: riots, tuition, the deaths of university students and their effect on the community.
Breaking news will have a greater weight on the new Diamondback Online. The crime blog will serve as a venue for up-to-date reports on crimes as they unfold. It will also be a place to feature minor crimes that are of interest to the student body but don’t make it onto news pages.
We’ll also feature lighter fare on the website. The “DiamondBuzz” portion of the site will link to world, national and entertainment stories. In addition to the crime blog, there will be live blogging from sports games and a community news blog that will offer unlimited space for stories about special events or fundraisers that rarely make it into the newspaper.
Community news is immensely important to our readers and for too long has been ignored by The Diamondback. I encourage everyone to contact the staff with any information about such events; chances are if you don’t see it in the print edition you’ll see it online.
Opportunities for reader feedback on the new site will abound. There will be more message boards and comment boxes.
Community news coverage will be expanded in the print edition as well. Last year, we started a student life desk to cover the various interests of typical students on the campus. This year the desk has grown, and we have devoted an editor to work solely with those reporters to ensure no stories are missed. We have also created an occasional series to document a day in the life of interesting community members.
I don’t stay in an ivory tower; the staff and I work out of a small office on the third floor of the South Campus Dining Hall that you can visit any time. The student body has the power. By being vocal, expressing your opinions and turning out to vote in the upcoming elections, you are the ones who will set the agenda for higher education and determine the future of the university.
Mariana Minaya is The Diamondback’s editor in chief. She can be reached at m.minaya@dbk.umd.edu.
