It’s about time The Activist has a presence on social media considering how long this student newspaper has been around. What with the rise of new technological times, The Activist has had an uphill journey—having to adapt to the modern preferences that people have of reading “the news.” According to UC Berkley (a journalist school), “As more people consume news online, news organizations face the dilemma of reallocating resources to attract new readers and viewers while still trying to hold on to their existing, and usually aging, print or broadcast audiences.” Journalists and newspapers alike have faced many difficulties in keeping their professions and companies afloat. Although news is still something quite necessary in today’s times, people often access it in much different ways than in the early to mid 1900s.
In its earliest form, The Activist was a classically formatted newspaper; it was printed (yes on real paper) and then distributed around the school. Although this sounds prehistoric by today’s standards, we were much more well known throughout UCBA because of this method of presenting our newspaper. However, now that print newspapers have long been rotting in their shallow graves, we have struggled to stay afloat in this fast-moving campus. Often-times, when we ask students if they’ve heard of The Activist, we are met with expressions of confusion and surprise. “We have a student newspaper?” and “Wow, never heard of that!” are among the countless phrases we receive.
As we try to adapt to this ever-changing technological world, we decided to give social media a try. Of course, some consider Facebook to be a dying form of social media, but we decided to stick to our old-school roots and test it out. Our goal is to make The Activist something more accessible to people who do not keep up with it regularly. The new page is designed to remind students of interesting articles they can read. We hope that as they scroll through their social media, if they come across an article that looks interesting, they will make one easy click and find themselves on our site conveniently.
If you are a fan of our articles, then please like and share our page! We are trying to gain as much publicity as possible and show students how great the newspaper on campus is! We love to exercise our rights as students and voice our opinions in a safe, fun environment like The Activist. Dr. Neely McLaughlin , a current editor, encourages us to be creative and opinionated with our articles. If you have any ideas or requests for us to address in our articles, please visit the site and inform us of your thoughts. We cannot wait to see how our new social media presence will affect our audience.
