Welcome fellow Bulldogs to a new journey — the start of the school year, which holds a possibility for personal breakthroughs, educational discoveries and months of unforgettable memories.
As you were all getting ready for the semester, we at The Collegian were hard at work training our new staff and generating ideas for stories and projects we want to pursue.
This is an exciting time for all of us. The Collegian’s world is changing, as it is in many other media organizations. Last year we set out on the task to rebrandourselves by looking for new ways to impart Fresno State’s news and reach our students.
This year we begin the semester with more than double the staff we had before. The newsroom is now comprised of the most diverse group of students we’ve had in many years who represent a vast number of educational backgrounds, ethnicities, sexual orientations and gender identifications.
I am one of the students who falls under the minority spectrum. I am the first women to take the lead of The Collegian since 2007. The opportunity humbles me. As I think back to the day I attended Dog Days, I remember the speaker saying Fresno State was a community in which leaders evolved to reach their full potential. At that time I would have never imagined that as a first-generation student who felt as lost as any other freshman does today, I would one day be taking the reigns of this news organization.
Fresno State is a place where you begin as a new student in a sea of unknowingness. Through years of spending long hours behind textbooks and computers, campus involvement and hard work, you finally find your personal strengths and passions. Now I look at my staff eager to learn and go out into the campus and follow their stories. I am excited to see who they will become at the end of their journey in The Collegian.
The expansion in staff will help us immerse ourselves and extend our reach into the campus community and tackle a variety of topics. Our mission is to inform you about daily campus life, share everyday stories of struggles and triumphs and make students aware of current international and national events that can affect our lives.
One route we have adopted is a digital-first platform. For many years, The Collegian was printing three days a week — starting this semester we will begin printing twice a week: Mondays and Wednesdays. This change will not impact the quantity of our content. We will, in fact, be producing more.
The Collegian’s website will be updated on a daily basis with breaking news, sporting events and other campus happenings. We will also be growing our new project, The Collegian blog. The blog will be focusing on reviewing things a college student can relate with from newly released Netflix shows to what is the best Fresno State ice cream flavor.
We have also added a few more positions including our new social media team who will be around campus documenting Fresno State live events. Our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat will be dedicated on handing students all the information they need about campus on a moment to moment basis.
We, The Collegian, are here for you. It’s our paper — it’s your paper. We are Fresno State.