Everyone at The Post pride themselves on being able to serve Southeast Ohio and the Athens community. As Ohio University students, we bask in the chance to write about the place, people and things to have so greatly affected our time in college. Nonetheless, I speak for everyone at The Post when I say, running a publication and publishing a weekly paper during a global pandemic isn’t easy.
To give a little insight into our world, The Post revolves around our staff working together, and specifically working together within our beloved newsroom. Obviously, due to COVID-19 and the necessary precautions and regulations OU has implemented, most of The Post’s staff isn’t able to feasibly live in Athens this fall—alas, the show must go on.
Adapting where need be and really giving the term “experiential learning” a run for its money, The Post has been trying to run as normally as possible, despite everything being far from normal. Including us moving our daily budget meetings to Zoom, having writers report from their hometowns and adjusting our print distribution plans, The Post has been rolling with the punches, and ultimately I think it’s gone well, but please, bear with us.
Our reporters are gathering information remotely, covering some of the biggest stories Athens has ever seen and reporting on public affairs from different time zones. Covering a city council meeting in a city hundreds of miles away – from your childhood bedroom – is no easy feat, but we are doing exactly that. This is all on top of dealing with the nightmare that is an all-online semester.
To be clear, when I ask you all to bear with us, I’m not looking or calling for any sympathy from any of our readers. In fact, I think The Post staff is all quite proud of the real-world content we’ve been producing so far this year, as well as the stories and projects we have in the works.
When I ask you to bear with us, I’m really just asking you all to remember the state of the world right now and to realize that we are striving to do the best with the limitations we’ve been presented with this Fall Semester. The pandemic has given us a trial and error mentality. Between how we display stories on our social media to how we distribute our weekly print tabloid, The Post has been and will continue to try and switch things up this year.
It would be ridiculous to think we’re the only publication going through it right now. I know we aren’t. Student and professional newsrooms across the country have been affected by COVID-19, but despite this, these newsrooms have also been churning out some of the most important news local communities need right now—The Post is striving to do the same for Athens.
So, I ask again, bear with us as we continue to adapt to COVID-19’s world, and we’ll promise to continue to do our jobs of providing you the latest news in Athens and Southeast Ohio.
Molly Schramm is a senior studying journalism at Ohio University and the editor-in-chief of The Post. Have questions? Email Molly at ms660416@ohio.edu or tweet her @_molly_731.
