Turning Over a New, Digital Leaf

Every so often, I clean the clutter that piles up around The Clock office, usually stacks of paper, empty bottles and chip bags, sometimes boomerangs and mini basketballs, all the result of many long days and nights spent by my incredibly hard working and dedicated staff working here, eating here, decompressing here. And every time, without fail, I find little fortune cookie notes scattered about, always an additional perk besides the general sense of accomplishment and serenity I get from being able to enjoy a clean office for a few hours.

I spent my last day of summer vacation immersed in such an endeavor, rearranging, dusting, filling the recycle bins with last year's clutter, and collecting fortunes. I taped a few that I found especially inspirational around the room, on my staff members' desks, common work places in the office where one might (often) find themselves stressed out and in need of a reassuring proverb. But one I kept for myself and taped to my computer. It read: "Go after what you want: there's no time like the present."

It is in this spirit and this mentality that I made a decision that, I believe, will impact The Clock in a way that it has not been impacted in years.

Beginning this year, The Clock will be printing every two weeks, rather than weekly as it has in the past. Many factors have had a hand in influencing this decision, and I believe I owe it to you, the wonderful readers of The Clock, to let you know why we've brought these changes about.

First and foremost, this organization has been trying for years to change its nature as being a primarily printed medium to a more diverse, multi-media organization. While I, as a somewhat traditional girl and a lover of words on a page, hate to see the downfall of good old-fashioned news on a paper, I have had to accept that the print medium is rapidly becoming passé, and that news organizations must either embrace online opportunities or forever fall by the wayside. We at The Clock have chosen to embrace and evolve.

Now, if you're reading this and thinking, 'Hey, The Clock already has a website,' you would be correct, but it has been proven to me that simply having a website does not necessarily ensure a strong web presence, as it has not done so for this organization in the past. And why should it have? For years, theclockonline.com has been the estranged distant relative of The Clock, the paper version that we all know and love. The website has been an afterthought for the staff, and perhaps not even a thought at all for a lot of our readers, which is why I see the need for such a change.

After much deliberation, printing every two weeks seemed to be the best means of achieving not only what I want, but what my staff wants and what generations of past staff members have wanted, which is to draw focus and attention to theclockonline.com. Not only will we be printing almost half the amount of papers per year as we have in the past, but we will be reporting more frequently and in a much more accessible fashion. The paper edition of The Clock will be reserved for the best, most popular and most important stories that come out of this office throughout the week. And the website will no longer be updated once a week, but continually throughout the week as news happens and becomes a story. I expect that it will take time for my staff to get used to this new method, and I ask that our readers have patience at first, because we are doing this in order to provide Plymouth State University with the service of fuller and more consistent reporting that it deserves and, I'm sure, has longed for.