About the online KENT NEWS

Starting this (our 100^th!) year, the KENT NEWS is going to host its articles on the web, accessible to the entire Kent Community with a click of the mouse.

The Centennial Issue, which offered a retrospective of the paper’s 100-year history, did not mark the final paper issue of the NEW, however.

Keeping with tradition, “the News will still print the first and last issues of the year,” says Faculty Advisor O’Dwyer. The October issue and the Prize Day issue will still be printed and distributed among students, faculty, parents, and alumni.

The NEWS will also offer two-page special issues to be distributed on-campus only. “These are ‘themed’ papers, and could be something like a holiday issue, like a Thanksgiving issue,” says O’Dwyer.

The vast bulk of the paper’s content, however, will be published primarily online. This new format represents significant cost and It also offers a huge improvement in the timeliness of the paper’s reporting, News can now have up-to-date information about what’s happening on campus. “People don’t want to read about games that happened three weeks ago,” says O’Dwyer, “With the website, an event can occur on Monday and we’ll have the article up by Wednesday.”

The article-writing process is also going to change. The web format means much more responsiveness to reader interest and much more space for content: “the articles are going to go bottom-up now, instead of top-down,” says O’Dwyer. It will be much easier for the students not in the NEWS to become involved. They can submit photos, videos, or even their own articles, which might make it on to the NEWS site.

One question raised by the new article-writing process is whether or not the quality of the articles would drop when the articles are submitted by a wide range of people and published quickly to meet demand.

“The website will still be KENT NEWS Quality,” O’Dwyer says. Meeting shorter deadlines and dealing with potentially rougher content will be a challenge for O’Dwyer and the student editors, but it is a task she says they’re up for.

Johnny Choi, Staff Writer