This semester will be the last time The Post prints as a daily newspaper — and we're celebrating.
This semester will be The Post's last as a daily newspaper.
Starting Fall 2016, the century-old, independent student newspaper at Ohio University will redesign its print product as a weekly tabloid, expand its digital operations and revamp thepostathens.com.
And we're celebrating.
News media is readily evolving, enhancing old traditions and carefully crafting new ones to fit appropriately with its readers. To watch storytelling shape-shift from print to digital isn't to witness a sad and slow demise, it's just to patiently wait for what's next.
But The Post has waited long enough, and we’ve been pretty patient. Our editors’ proposal to recreate the way we think as a newsroom and act as a media outlet comes from months of careful planning and research.
That’s why we can no longer consider thepostathens.com as an afterthought to our print publication, which prints every day classes are in session at OU. It’s not best practice for serving our readers — who overwhelmingly view us on mobile devices — nor our most digitally-forward writers, photographers, videographers, designers, copy editors and developers, who should be rewarded for their attention to our most valuable product.
We’re not abandoning our 100-year history as the campus publication. We’re shaping it for what it’s always been — a reflection of the exhaustingly innovative students who give their precious time to The Post’s newsroom and the readers who demand we speak their language. These days, that’s through the smartphone resting in their palms.
We’d rather run with that fact than turn our backs to it.
So, we’ll make a website that’s optimized for mobile viewing, publish dozens of articles online daily that we feel are interesting to our readers and necessary to OU’s students, connect with those same readers on social media throughout the week and hope to find them picking up a 24-page print edition of The Post each Thursday.
The Post’s print supplement will be driven by longform, analysis-driven and investigative content, as well as illustrations, infographics and our talented photo staff’s images. It won’t be the same print Post as you know it now — it’ll be something worth taking back to the dorm, the coziest corner in Alden Library or the coffee shop Uptown to enjoy.
To see what that might look like, check out the “test copy” our designers — Matt Ryan and Chance Brinkman-Sull — so lovingly crafted either online or in print. We’ll be passing out these limited editions in front of Baker University Center on Friday at 12 p.m., and there will be copies in Baker 325 for anyone who wants one.
If you don’t like what you see, please tell us. The Post wouldn’t exist without its readers, and we want to hear both what you think and want out of the newspaper.
One last thing: If you’re reading this, thank you. We’re a century strong and still independent because you’ve stuck with us. We’re excited to see where this goes.
Emma Ockerman is a junior studying journalism and editor-in-chief of The Post. Want to talk to her? Email her at eo300813@ohio.edu.
