Kara Christensen

The Collegian: Live and in Color!

Putting together the Collegian&s first back-to- school issue in years has been, to say the least, challenging.

For most of the summer, I worked as an intern at the Rapid City Journal. I made it back to Brookings for two staff meetings, but let me tell you, trying to coordinate this project long distance over E-mail was pretty crazy.

I moved back to Brookings two weeks ago and have been living in Collegian-land ever since. Just ask anyone who&s tried to talk to me about anything else.

The cool thing is that most readers will look at the newspaper and see the result without feeling the hard work, stress and late nights spent agonizing over the amount of spacing between a headline and a story.

Well, maybe that&s just me.

My staff will probably begin calling me the Space Nazi behind my back, you know, like the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld.

The best moment in the last week was when I realized we now have a page called &B1.& That&s right folks, the Collegian now has an &A& section and a &B& section.

For some reason, that makes the paper seem more professional and serious to me. Two sections means more to write, more advertising sold and a larger commitment by the staff to cover the university community. And this ultimately means a better newspaper for you, the reader.

Sure, we&ve added color, a State & Local page and a Lifestyles page, but to me, a page called &B1& is truly significant.

It puts us in a higher class of newspapers.

And being in a higher class of newspapers is just what we&re after this year.

We&ve given this paper an overhaul in design, content and structure. Perhaps more importantly, we&ve expanded our focus.

It&s not just about the students. It&s about the faculty, the staff and our host town, Brookings.

Our ad manager, Char Telkamp, told the managing editor and I in her interview that last year&s Collegian had nothing that was relevant to her life as a non-traditional student. This made us realize how important it is to consider the wide variety of readers we serve.

We hope the new &State and Local& page will give you news you can use, whether about Students& Association activities, Brookings City Council meetings or the candidates in hot ticket races, whom we will interview as Election Day approaches.

Our Lifestyles page will be a fun escape from reading your biology textbook or grading essays.

Each week you can check out your horoscope, complete a word search or crossword puzzle and learn about SDSU&s history in tidbits from Collegians published over the last century. The history feature will debut in the Sept. 10 issue.

The feature article on the Lifestyles page will rotate weekly through four topics: food, religion, body & mind and education & employment. We&ll also publish announcements, from engagements to weddings to births to obituaries.

We&re excited to hear what you think about these changes.

We hope you&ll look forward to each issue of the Collegian. We look forward to hearing what you think of the changes we&ve made. Your feedback matters.

Just don&t suggest eliminating page &B1.&

I don&t think I could do it.

Kara Christensen is the Collegian&s editor-in-chief. She can be reached at [email protected].