Junior journalism and microbiology major

Think about the first time you walk into a new job. All you really want is to find a routine: something tried and true that you know works. And it’s easy to get stuck in a routine. Why change something that’s comfortable?

But imagine if you found out your routine wasn’t working and if you didn’t change something soon, you’d lose your job — or at least have one far different from the one you dreamed of. A job that simply wouldn’t cut it.

That’s how the last several months at The Diamondback have been. I’ve only been editor in chief for four months, and with my tenure came an almost entirely new editorial staff. We’ve barely settled into our jobs, but we found out last year that our readership has nearly halved, and we knew we immediately had to find a way to win our readers back if we wanted to survive another 102 years.

So while change is never easy — and often comes with a lot of risks — this whole staff unanimously decided it was more important to reengage our readers than to make our jobs easier.

Clearly, the way we were delivering our news wasn’t working anymore. And that’s why over the last several months, we’ve essentially overhauled the way many things have been done.

We’ve been working to improve our presence everywhere: in print, through social media and most importantly, online. Today we unveiled an entirely new website that’s much faster, better integrates our social media, enables us to better display our photos and multimedia and happens to work all of the time.

With this site comes a lot of other changes to ensure you’re constantly informed and have a reason to visit multiple times a day. For the first time in the paper’s history, we have an online editor solely dedicated to ensuring our site is consistently updated with new and fresh content, and that our social media lets you know what’s going on at all times. The site allows us to get news to you faster — and to keep you coming back for more, we have online-only reporters writing content just for the web. Oh, and did I mention there are games?

We’ll also be rolling out a free mobile application in the coming weeks for Android and iPhone operating systems. We know we live in a 24/7 news cycle, and we want The Diamondback to be your No. 1 source for university and community news. You won’t even have to pull out your computer to see what’s going on.

You also hopefully noticed The Diamondback you’re holding right now looks significantly different than the last one you picked up. We’ve updated our design to a cleaner and more professional look so our content is easier for you to read through.

If you walked into the newsroom a decade ago, then saw it again just a few months ago, not much would have looked different. The computers were the same, there was still that ratty old couch in the office and editors’ signatures and words of wisdom from more than 20 years ago were still written on the walls.

Maybe our newsroom hasn’t physically changed much — except for new computers. But our product certainly has, and we wanted to start the year off with a new face. This isn’t a paper that just comes out once a day; it’s a paper that’s adapting to the world of instant communication and has moved into the digital era.

We’re still experimenting and finding out what works best. Like I said, change is never easy. But don’t be afraid to speak up and let us know how we can continue to adapt and improve, because we’re doing all of this for the same reason we come in here every night to put together a newspaper: because our readers and our community are more important to us than anything else. At the end of the day, we’re here to serve you.

Yasmeen Abutaleb is a junior journalism and microbiology major. She can be reached at abutaleb@umdbk.com.