This past year, The Concordian saw new projects come to fruition. In the winter semester, we launched our first-ever radio show and a series of weekly spreads about part-time faculty professors at the university. We had a video team that put out content regularly—also a first. In addition, we had opportunities to interview amazing individuals, including Homa Hoodfar and Mohamed Fahmy, and attend awesome events, like South By Southwest (SXSW) and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). We’ve even broke a few stories before mainstream media outlets did.
Among the successes and fulfilling experiences, we’ve also learned a lot about the world of journalism and the nature of writing about and for university students. Here are some of the key things we’ve learned as a team over the course of this year:
The importance of diversity
We believe diversity is important not only within our newsroom, but within the content of our articles. We try our best to give a voice to the voiceless and cover events that will help educate students on important social and environmental issues within the university or the city. We’ve also tried to cater to people with varying political views within our opinions section—we believe healthy debate and discussion is important in order for us to sympathize and understand one another. Next year, we hope to more actively report on all faculties within Concordia, to further diversify our content.
How to embrace criticism
With publishing articles comes readers, and with readers comes criticism. Not everyone is going to like every article we put out, and that’s okay. As reporters and writers, we are constantly learning—we are bound to make mistakes, despite our best efforts to be as accurate and sensitive as possible in our reporting. While criticism can be discouraging at first, over the year, we’ve learned to acknowledge it and, in turn, refine our approach to our practice. Our readers always have the option to write a letter to the editor or, if it’s in reference to an ops piece, write a rebuttal. And for the people spewing out incoherent hate messages about articles we’ve published, we ain’t got time for you.
How to be innovative
Working at a student newspaper comes with pressures to meet deadlines and the need to think on your feet when things don’t go as planned. Nearly every week, we’ve been faced with articles falling through or interview subjects not getting back to us. As a team, we’ve aimed to support one another when something goes wrong and always look for solutions. We are proud of the creativity everyone brought to every issue. Going into volume 35, we hope our team continues to be one collaborative family.
On behalf of the team, we’ve had a blast putting an immense amount of energy and love into volume 34 of The Concordian. With the recent launch of our new website, we’ll be bringing you so much more next year. It is really only up from here.
See you around,
The Concordian team