At the start of the 2023 school year, the International Times’ situation looked dire. No articles had been published to the website in over 6 months, many contributors from previous years had left the club, and plans to move the newspaper to a newsletter publication had fallen through. As we move into 2024, I would like to take this opportunity to look at the improvements made since the start of the school year, the current state of the newspaper, and planned initiatives to enhance it further.
The first major initiative taken to reshape the newspaper was restructuring the leadership by separating the role of Editor-in-Chief into three separate roles. With three separate leadership positions, Written Content Manager, Non-Written Content Manager, and Publisher, the INTimes has been able to divide labor more effectively. It also allowed us to broaden our horizons beyond just writing and into, for example, photography. Another major improvement made in the past months has been fixing the website, which has made our publishing process smoother. One last improvement has been collaborating with the school administration to further our outreach through per-publication emails to students and teachers, which you may have received.
So, if there have been so many improvements compared to the previous school year, how is the International Times faring now? I am pleased to report that the newspaper is doing well compared to previous years. In the last 30 days, we have received nearly 15x as many article views as we did in the same period in 2022. Our scope has also broadened, with new photos from the fall Duke of Edinburgh Award camping trip available (and easily accessible through the Featured Photography tab). Yet not all is perfect with the newspaper. As of this week’s publication, we’ve published 19 articles, which is not sufficient to meet our goals. Our publishing volume has increased over time, but it may be a while before our goals are met. Similarly, our ratio of incomplete articles to published articles exceeds our target. Despite gaining a few new members during the term, we have fewer contributors compared to previous years. We’ve also recently had some issues with miscommunication over the past few weeks. Overall, the state of the newspaper is relatively stable, especially compared to last year, but there is still room to grow.
Moving on to plans for the future, one of our goals is to maintain our quality of publication while increasing the amount of new content published per cycle. Despite these intentions, many contributors are also very busy, and this goal often cannot be reconciled with the circumstances of our members. We have also set up a new system for website quality control where certain contributors have been given the responsibility of post-publication quality control and assisting the Publisher. Additionally, we are currently in the process of drafting an official charter and set of expectations. Our future ideas also include diversifying our newspaper by including some non-English articles, creating per-publication advertisements, and setting up an article idea suggestion box.
To summarize, the International Times has faced large but mostly positive changes over the course of this term. Although the year started at a snail’s pace, we have slowly increased our publication volume and intend to continue working to provide readers with a plethora of interesting articles. Our viewership has grown significantly compared to previous years, and we have broadened our horizons in the types of works we publish. All in all, the first half of the 2023-2024 school year has been a period of meaningful improvement for the International Times!
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