Editorial: The Advocate reflects on a year of ups and downs

With the academic year drawing to a close and as end-of-term events begin, The Advocate editors have been reflecting on the 31 issues of this year’s newspaper.

It has been an interesting year here at The Advocate, where we have experienced our own set of ups and downs, culminating with a first place General Excellence award in 2012-13 Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association (ONPA) collegiate competition.

The Advocate staff has experienced quite a change in personnel on the editorial board and our writing staff, both of which are legacies losing our instructional support when our former instructor and full-time adviser Bob Watkins retired and the college decided to let our journalism fields lie fallow.

However, this obstacle forced us to branch out and form new or improved relationships: with the Associated Student Government and with the student activities staff; with the departments in Integrated Media, resulting in a design template submitted by a graphic design student for our weekly issue posters; with two photography students covering a multitude of events both on and off campus for us; with a graphic design student becoming our resident designer on the newspaper; and implementation of two internships for a graphic design and video student to work with The Advocate next year.

The editorial board also took a lead role in balancing the student fee budget during the Student Finance Council process in early winter, garnering praise from David Sussman, manager of the Student Union and grant sponsored programs, for our leadership in helping bring the council to a successful end.

The Advocate’s crowning achievement, the feather in our cap, was the first place general excellence award, the first in the history of The Advocate. The award was given by the ONPA, an association of professional and collegiate journalists in Oregon that puts on a major competition that all college newspaper are allowed to enter in one of three divisions: non-daily, non-four-year newspapers; non-daily four-year newspapers; and daily four-year newspapers. The Advocate won our division’s general excellence award based on the coverage and design of the three issues we submitted.

In the interest of full disclosure, it must also be said that The Advocate staff would not be human if we didn’t have our handful of mistakes to add to our handful of accomplishments.

One of our goals at the beginning of the year was to broaden our coverage of clubs on campus to feature one club at least once a month. We soon found ourselves in the hustle and bustle of putting out the newspaper week after week and soon saw our club coverage slow to a trickle and then dry up altogether. This will remain one of our few regrets of this year, not being able to immerse our reporters in the diverse world of campus clubs and bring our readers to the same intimate knowledge of the clubs.

Another of our slip-ups was maintenance of our reporting staff.  We have had a core stable of writers, but having recruited a number of new reporters and beginning their journalism training, we soon found that the number began to dwindle as work, school and sheer stress started to cull our herds of wordsmiths. The main downside is that next years staff will start with same manpower shortage that we had in September.

Interacting with our readers and the wider college community outside of the lens of our weekly issues and website was another goal for this year, but one that we came to late in the year, finally streamlining our Twitter and Facebook in May and adding Instagram to our social media repertoire. Having seen our activity and interaction via social media grow since then, we can only imagine how many new readers we could have reached and how much more variety we could have worked into our weekly coverage. This is something else we bequeath to next year’s staff. We hope they learn from our misstep in this area.

But on the whole, when we look at the front pages of each issue posted in our office and see the improvement and a progressive march toward journalistic excellence, we feel proud of what we as a newspaper staff and editorial board have accomplished. We hope you have shared, enjoyed and benefitted from the journey.