I had multiple people ask me during interviews this semester, “What is your mission for the East Tennessean next semester?” To be honest, last semester I wasn’t entirely sure.

I mainly concentrated on new responsibilities and organizing the paper.

In retrospect, I see that the mission is more important than just organization and personal adaptation.

This semester I am more confident in myself and in this paper as a whole.

Since I’ve been the editor of the East Tennessean, I have been highly concerned with the way students, faculty and staff view the campus newspaper.

I’ve heard people say everything from they ‘always grab an issue on the way to class and skim over it,’ to they, ‘didn’t even know the college had a paper.’

I have heard people say they love it and they hate it.

No matter what someone is saying, we take pride that they at least know we are here.

But we don’t want it to stop at acknowledging our existence; we want people to know we are here to serve our campus community.

The East Tennessean is looking forward to the spring 2011 semester because of the many events we get to cover and bring to the campus community’s attention.

ETSU’s Centennial Celebration continues this semester and we will publish plenty of stories shaped around that theme.

We are also excited to implement many new ideas developed last semester after a few staff members attended the 2010 National College Media Convention in Louisville, Ky.

We plan to have more music-related articles and event calendars.

We have plans to utilize the website more often with blogs and breaking news unavailable in our print edition.

Our Twitter and Facebook pages are also going to be more active this semester.

Although the Internet is one great way to communicate with our readers we feel that the print version is still our No. 1 way to reach the student body.

We plan to put the majority of our effort into increasing readership through accuracy and content appeal.

These are the reasons we are going to make some noise this semester.

We want to get noticed – not just to get people reading but also to let people know that their college publication is a platform through which they can be heard.

The staff is comprised of students who are passionate about journalism and we take pride in creating this publication.

We will be working diligently this semester to bring readers a great paper and one of the ways you can help us is to interact, spread the word and understand that you can contribute to our efforts.

If you have something to say, we’ll listen. We routinely print letters to the editor from students in this section.

I’m thrilled to see what we can do and just to remind readers of our mission. It goes a little something like this: The mission of the East Tennessean is to provide a forum for students, faculty and staff to express their views and interests, disseminate campus-related information in advance as well as to report and interpret news events to all students, faculty and staff members, administrators and alumni of the university.

As we embark on this journalistic endeavor, we hope we’ll continuously gain support of the campus community. We live to serve you.

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