New semester holds a bright future for The Transcript

New technology, live coverage, radio station to bring in a new era of journalism at OWU

Have you noticed anything different about The Transcript you’re holding?

I certainly hope so.

I would say that my first semester as the paper’s editor began as a whirlwind, but really it would be more appropriate to call it a hurricane.

There was a major change between the top editors on our staff, serious issues with the technology we depend on to produce the paper and, of course, stories that challenged me ethically.

From Elliott Hall’s pipes exploding, to the horrific attack against one of our own students last spring, I found myself in our office in Phillips until 4 a.m. on several occasions.

Because of internal staffing issues and external factors we couldn’t control, I used to have anxiety every time I checked my email.

I would be so convinced someone else would be angrily informing me about a mistake, a quote or some larger issue that I had let slip through my fingers.

But I think I’m starting to get my groove back.

Thanks to my team here and a summer to prepare myself properly, I’m feeling pretty optimistic about this semester (knock on wood). We got a little bit of a makeover, and a lot of help from our department head, Paul Kostyu, to finally bring our department into the 21st century.

We plan to provide our student body with more live coverage of events by live-tweeting and keeping consistent with our social media.

Our radio station is on its way, and we will be broadcasting news and public affairs programming during the day and music and talk shows into the evening.

We plan to increase the number of columns and we want to work towards reporting on more diverse coverage than we have in the past. Also on our radar are a lot of promising reporters who we are confident have a lot of potential.

I’ve worked on this paper for all seven of my semesters here; first as a reporter, then as A&E editor and now as the Editor-in-Chief. I don’t know what I am going to do without it, but I do know I want to leave it better than ever.

Cheers to a great semester, everyone.