Colgate’s news consumption habits are at once cutting-edge and anachronistic. On any given day, Colgate students will read the websites or watch the broadcasts of CNN, ESPN, El País, Fox, Facebook and a host of other mass-media outlets. Yet, we do this all without thinking about the growing peculiarity of a half-hour spent paging through The New York Times or The Colgate Maroon-News. In the last six months, average newspaper circulation fell 10.6 percent year-over-year, a figure mitigated only by an increase in some papers’ paid website subscriptions. While our paper has thus far maintained its role as a major forum for discussion and debate on the Colgate campus, our staff can feel the winds of change. In response, today we are pleased to announce a major development in history of our paper, the launch of an all-new online edition of The Colgate Maroon-News at www.maroon-news.com.

While the Maroon-News will still be available in print format each week as it has been since 1868, our new website will complement and vastly expand the offerings of the oldest college weekly in America. Our four sections will offer multimedia coverage of campus news, events and sports games in conjunction with our campus media partners WRCU and CUTV. An array of campus bloggers will broaden the scope of the campus discussion to include issues of both local and national interest. Finally, our ability to interact with readers will increase dramatically with new polls, opportunities to comment on articles and an expanding group of contributors with new and different connections to the Colgate student body. Our hope is that these new elements of our site will promote a greater sense of inclusivity across the Colgate campus and provide a public forum appropriate for the styles of the current era in online communication.

This launch is the culmination of several months of work by an internal online working group that strove to tailor our new site to the needs and tastes of the Colgate community. While we are extremely pleased with the final product, web design is an ever-evolving media, and we hope that you will contact us with comments, suggestions and general feedback about the site. Likewise, as new content and elements are added to the site over the coming weeks and months, we encourage you to get involved and contact our staff with your ideas for stories and original online content. Colgate alumni include countless figureheads in journalism and media and we hope that our new site will expand the availability of hands-on opportunities for the next generation of reporters and journalists. Our staff includes not just writers, but bloggers, photographers, videographers, broadcasters and print and web designers. We welcome the help of any student with interest in these or related fields.

These changes in online media are a major step forward for both the Maroon-News and news media writ large. While we are excited to share with you this new web edition, rest assured that we affirm our commitment to high-quality student journalism that is both timely and germane to the Colgate community. Please contact us with any questions or concerns you may have regarding this exciting development for our paper.