Editorial
The Spectator looks to change with the times
By Editorial Staff
November 6, 2015
Because The Spectator is entirely student-run with no oversight, we never really have anyone looking in on what we do. Last Thursday, we hosted a panel to speak on the future of journalism, and it was a good opportunity to reevaluate our own practices.
Jim Kennedy, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Enterprise Development at the Associated Press and his two daughters, Meredith ’09, Associate Booking Producer at NBC News and Liz ’05, Director of Content Strategy and Social Media at Fresh Direct, spoke about the extent to which the information world has changed, specifically in the realm of social media and journalism. For perspective, during Liz’s senior year at Hamilton, she wrote her thesis on “The Facebook” a then infant website that many insisted was just a fad. Last week, when we announced Neil deGrasse Tyson as the next Sacerdote Great Names Speaker on our Facebook page, 21,000 people saw that post.
Still, we realized that while we’re students, conceivably on the vanguard of internet use, our publication is decidedly old-fashioned. We consistently struggle with finding reach for our articles and presenting them in a creative, twenty-first century way. We’ll still committed to the regular layout and paper copies. We’ve been slow to mobilize resources like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And we haven’t done enough of what a publication like ours is really good for: experimentation.
This is a time we hope to start changing the way we reach our peers. Students aren’t picking up paper copies of the New York Times, so why should we expect them to grab The Spectator? We hope to usher in a new era in how we inform the student body, provoke conversation and share ideas.