Maroon-News Goes Worldwide On The Web

The oldest college weekly in America now has its own webpage.

The Colgate Maroon-News offers online access to its publications – old and new – as well as a variety of other features. The site, located at www.maroon-news.com, is available to everyone and is the next step in creating a more professional and modern newspaper.

Every section of the Maroon-News is located on the website: arts and features, news, Colgate sports and commentary. Print and e-mail versions of the stories are also available. The online version offers up-to-date coverage of national and international news with its 24 hour news. In addition to displaying the local weather, the website provides links to the most recent entertainment, technology and business news.In addition, users have to create an online account. Senior Sunit Sindurakar, who created and manages the website, detailed this process.

“Some of the features that we already have are individual user accounts for registered users, which allow the users to participate in the online message board,” Sindurakar said. “The registered users will receive the E-mail Edition for each issue, with headlines and updates. All users can participate in the weekly poll, search the articles using different criteria, access the back issues and send messages to the editors.”

Editor-in-Chief Steve Fair thought that technologically advancing the paper was a necessary change.

“We are making efforts to make the newspaper more ‘Division One,’ meaning more visibility and professionalism, something that goes hand-in-hand with a website,” he said.

Fair mentioned that having The Maroon-News online would also help the publication keep in touch with alumni. The Maroon-News has been online before, but it failed to take off. Director of Student Technologies Resource Group Judy Doherty explained why an online paper was problematic.

“The paper had struggled for some time with the online version. The challenge was finding someone to do it,” Doherty said. “It was incredibly time consuming and tedious work.” The old website was designed by Information Technologies Services (ITS) staff members and was meant to be taken over by students, but the shift never transpired. Thus, The Maroon-News stopped publishing its online version in the fall of 2003.

The new site, however, has drastic changes that will allow for future success. It was created with College Publisher, a digital publishing services provider, which makes maintaining and updating the website less of a challenge.

Doherty believes that a website is crucial for communication purposes.”It is an invaluable resource for every Colgate constituent, both on and off campus – students, faculty, staff, prospective students, parents, alumni, friends of the college, donors – anyone associated or who wants to be associated with the college,” Doherty said.

“The website is still in the pilot stage, and there is a lot of room for improvements,” Sindurakar said.

Although the website has been a huge achievement, Doherty expects much more to come.

“This is just the beginning…version 1.0,” she said.