To the Ithaca College Community,
Since its founding in 1931, The Ithacan has strived to inform and educate its audience by bringing insightful and purposeful community journalism to the students, faculty, staff and alumni of Ithaca College, the surrounding area and, in more recent years, a broader online audience.
Our staff members diligently uphold The Ithacan’s values of accuracy, independence and integrity while keeping the well-being of our audience at the forefront of our work in order to serve the interests of the greater campus community.
For the 2023–24 academic year, we will continue to do the same, but with a different look, as we move to a bi-weekly print schedule and work to meet the evolving needs of our audience through an increased digital presence.
Like many things in our online-focused world, how readers interact with news has changed. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center study, Americans 18 and older prefer digital devices for getting the news compared to print. Out of Americans aged 18-29, 81% prefer to get their news digitally, while 4% prefer print publications.
To address these preferences, college media programs across the country have increased their online focus, emphasizing digital content and social media, in order to better serve their audiences within that 18-24-year-old range.
The college media industry is shifting and The Ithacan is more than ready to change along with it.
The tradition and legacy of The Ithacan lies not within our ability to produce a weekly print issue, but with the 92 years of high-quality, accurate and informative content that we have provided our readers. In service to our audience, we knew we needed to better align with their increasing expectations for timely and engaging content.
We will be creating fewer print issues, but this does not mean less overall content.
Instead, we will continue to increase our social media presence and multimedia work to provide our audience with more daily digital, innovative content.
Moving forward, our focus will be on strengthening our community outreach and relationship to deliver more informed, insightful coverage. We hope to gain a better understanding of the many perspectives across the broader community we report on.
This digital shift also means that we will foster more collaboration within the sections of The Ithacan itself, which will allow us to produce a greater variety of projects.
Our video team has been producing creative, informative and entertaining videos that showcase new perspectives of the campus community in a variety of formats. We have increased our social media presence across multiple platforms and worked to align our content with platforms that suit it best. For example, featuring photo essays on Instagram, primarily a visual space, and live-tweeting sports and campus events in order to provide timely coverage.
Additionally, we updated our website to better serve our digital transition, with more opportunities for online design, audience engagement and multimedia journalism.
We will also continue to build upon our weekly newsletters, which were well-received by our audience when we launched them in Fall 2022, as a beginning step toward our digital shift. The newsletters provide timely updates to the campus community and beyond about content that matters to them, whether it’s news, arts and culture or sports focused.
Our digital focus allows for our staff of students to continue to learn and build a myriad of skills that are relevant to the current industry, including multimedia reporting, design, editing, photography and videography, along with ad sales, newsroom leadership and social media management.
The Ithacan has covered countless changes on campus throughout the years and we are both excited and prepared to make one ourselves. We know that this shift to a more digital focus will allow us to bring you, our audience, a greater variety of high-quality content and to create more connections across the campus community — the very community that motivates and inspires us to produce our work.
Thank you for your continued support.
Syd Pierre
Editor-In-Chief, 2023–24
