Dear reader,

As we enter our junior and senior years at Kent State, we can’t wait to share all the important, entertaining and wonderful things happening in and around our Kent community on KentWired.com and in our print newspapers. 

In our respective internships at local news sources, we have worked with many people as passionate about journalism as we are, and we’ve seen the impact our work has. While working on this Back to School print edition, we spent late nights writing and designing our pages. 

We hope while flipping through you can see all of the time, energy and thought we put into our coverage – and how we care greatly about this community. 

Students today may know The Kent Stater print newspaper as an occasional stack of papers taking up space on various newsstands in their class buildings.(We hope, at least, you think our covers look intriguing.) Maybe you were handed a Valentine’s Day zine last year and thought it was pretty neat. Or maybe you are a faithful supporter of print newspapers – and for that, we are extremely grateful. 

The Kent Stater and KentWired are informative, well-written, award-winning and vital media in a country where local journalism is undervalued, underfunded and, in some cases, threatened. 

But this does not faze us. It makes us strive to investigate harder and find new ways to have the public engage with our content because when people are knowledgeable, they are better. 

They vote smarter, think more critically, make better decisions and become more connected with their communities. It is important to understand what happens on our campus and in our town and neighboring towns to stay informed and prepared. 

While we are avid readers of The New York Times and The Washington Post, those media’s coverage does not always reflect the issues and triumphs of Northeast Ohio. National media will not report on administrative changes with the university, faculty buyouts or the best place to buy a beer in Kent, Ohio. 

This is where local newspapers, many having news websites in addition to print products, come in like us and The Akron Beacon Journal and the Record-Courier, whose first issues came out in the 1830s. We hope you or your families consider subscribing to The Beacon and The Record-Courier, if you have not already. Their coverage is fantastic and vital to our area.

But without people’s monetary support and readership, local papers may not be able to report on the issues and interests of our towns much longer, either. 

The Kent Stater published its first paper in 1926, under the name The Searchlight. Soon, the paper’s name changed to The Daily Kent Stater, and throughout the following decades, its staff published weekly papers to five-days-a-week issues, and everything in between. We now publish these special editions in addition to our daily online coverage. 

We cover sports, Kent city events and Kent State administration, among many other topics, while also publishing informative and fun opinion pieces — with amazing graphics from our design team — and other creative works. 

Our current 65-person staff (and counting) had already started working before the semester even began, and we all will be giving our heart to KentWired and The Stater because we love it, and we love journalism, and we love the Kent community. 

Our coverage revolves around a commitment to illuminating diverse voices and a key principle of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, one that has been ingrained in us by each of our dedicated and talented journalism professors:

Seek truth and report it. 

To keep our Kent community informed, we need your help. We need our newspaper picked up from stands and our articles shared online. We need readers like you to engage with and share our content and follow KentWired’s social media accounts. 

We care immensely about keeping the community informed about everything from Board of Trustees meetings to police investigations to the latest updates on the women’s volleyball team. We want our coverage to reflect the community – and we want our community to read it. 

Thank you for picking up this fall 2023 Back-to-School edition of The Kent Stater and for supporting our newsroom. 

We hope you will lean on us this semester for any and all news. We are here, always.

Our best this semester, 

Izzy and Grace

Isabella Schreck is editor-in-chief. Grace Springer is managing editor. Contact them at [email protected] and [email protected].