Dear reader,

Happy New Year (a little over a month late) – we hope the start of your 2024 and your semester has started off on a strong and smooth note. Thank you for picking up this now monthly print edition of The Kent Stater. 

The beginning of a new year can be scary, with its uncertainty and change. But it also brings along such amazing possibilities and opportunities. 

Maybe you’re into making those resolutions: read or work out more, drink less (yeah, right), be more on time to class (double yeah, right). 

Or maybe you prefer to keep a more abstract view: to chase a dream, achieve that goal in mind or travel to new places, willing to take on the challenges ahead. 

For us, we didn’t necessarily make resolutions, per se, but the start of the new year brought on realizations of how we want to be better people, better friends to others and better leaders of this newspaper and KentWired.com, the news website of The Kent Stater. 

We started on this last goal on Jan. 2 (we spent Jan. 1 being lazy, OK). Along with Kelsie Horner, The Stater’s assistant managing editor, and Cheryl Powell, our adviser, we thought of anything and everything we could do to ensure we are providing you, our audience and biggest priority, with the most timely and valuable daily content we can.

This process involved numerous spreadsheets, if you were curious. 

Many members of our passionate staff began working on this print edition during winter break, which marks the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that The Stater will enter a semester with a consistent print schedule.

Our 21-member editorial board worked throughout winter break to ensure we were set up for our five-story-minimum daily publishing schedule online and our monthly print papers. 

We are extremely, extremely grateful to get the opportunity to provide a wide range of content to our readers that brings out the best in our creative staff.

At our all-staff training day in January, we somehow fit 70 of our dedicated staff members in our newsroom comfortably, while still having ordered enough pizza for everyone. Now that was a great way to start off the new semester. 

After our Hungry Howie’s lunch, speakers came in to address our staff as a whole and in their individual teams. One professional of the journalism world, Rob Powers, a news anchor at WEWS-TV 5 in Cleveland, told us our job is not a “have to” – it’s a “get to.” 

And that could not be more true. 

We, as a newsroom, get to be what encompasses your content intake by providing you with the best work we can offer. We get to take our skills from the classroom and create stories, photos and illustrations we know are coming from the best our program offers.

We get to be curious about the world around us and relay that information back to you. That’s the rewarding part of the job.

Though we have to (well, sort of) turn in homework assignments, take exams and complete group projects, we get to come into the newsroom at the end of the school day and find friends and smiling faces (usually) and hear some of the funniest things we will ever hear. 

We get to help create a growing newsroom, with an 80-plus-person staff that has more than doubled since 2021 — a team that has produced the most consistent and encompassing content since the start of the pandemic. 

We get to – and strive to – equip our readers with the knowledge and intelligence to hopefully drive them to have more conversations, be more curious and, like us, ask more questions to stay informed and safe.  

There’s no doubt in our minds this semester and this year will bring on challenges: late nights, budgetary constraints, questioning AP style and political strife (good luck in advance to next semester’s editor and managing editor on that coverage). 

But, we focus on our positives, and we’re certain this year we will be able to produce more, provide greater multimedia content and ensure we are preparing the next group of talented, curious and intelligent journalists for the real world. 

So bring it on, 2024! 

We hope you will bring us – in paper form and on whatever device is in your back pocket – along for the ride. And it’s because of you, the reader.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to deliver content on a daily basis, allowing us to “get to” do this. 

So remember to stay peachy keen while you read this The Kent Stater this spring. 

Thank you for everything,
Izzy and Anthony