By Erasmus Baxter
Dear Readers,
The future is coming to the AS Review. To be completely honest, it has passed us to a degree and we’re trying to catch up to it.
While most students get their news from the internet and social media, our model has been built around producing a weekly paper. A paper that comes out four days after we put it together, practically a lifetime in our world, where news seems to be breaking constantly.
In the next few weeks, I will present our assessment recommendations to the Associated Students Management Council and ultimately the AS board.
Contained in those recommendations will be small suggestions about equipment fund management and staff training, but most importantly, it will lay out a plan to transition to becoming a digital-first paper.
This will entail cuts to our publication schedule. We will not publish during the first short weeks of the quarter, or during finals week (which is not different from how many editors have done it in the past), and starting next Spring we will reduce publication to every two weeks.
The flip side to this is we will be able to budget to have writers work for 15 hours a week instead of 12. This increase is small, but taken as a whole it will help allow us to produce more indepth, high-quality content.
That is my promise to you. Though the paper will come out only every two weeks, it will feature more longform, and deeper stories then we are able to do on a weekly basis, giving you a reason to pick it up and keep it around for two weeks.
This same model has been used effectively by The Stranger, a Seattle alt-weekly that I greatly admire, to excellent results.
Following us online will still give you access to the same news content as now, but in an even more timely manner. Some of our savings will also go towards boosting our posts on social media to ensure they keep appearing in your timelines.
We will also soon be debuting a weekly newsletter that will allow you an exclusive rundown of our stories in one place, without worrying about what tweaks to an algorithm are being made by someone in California.
These changes are an experiment. If we are able to be most effective online, then considering the budget issues facing the AS, maybe we should gradually begin to head in that direction. If we see a surge in interest in the paper edition, then that is something we will keep around.
In all, our goal is to serve you, all 16 thousand Associated Students of Western Washington University, and we will keep working to find how we can best do that and serve as a part of the fabric that ties us together and makes us stronger as a community. Just let us know how.
Erasmus Baxter
AS Review Editor in Chief
as.review.editor@wwu.edu