Breaking up is hard to do.
If the cover wasn’t clear enough for you, we’re moving on. Doing something new. Whatever you want to call it. The point is, the pages you’re reading right now will likely be the last the Belmont Vision ever prints. As of this summer, we will be an exclusively online enterprise at the award-winning belmontvision.com.
Call it a new relationship if you’d like, even though it’s still the end of an era for me and a host of other student reporters who have written for this paper.
While this will be the final print issue of the Vision, that doesn’t mean we are digging our own digital graves or becoming obsolete. At worst, we won’t go that far without a fight. We’re proud, frankly, of the opportunity we’re about to have and the path we’re about to tread. We know we’re a little ahead of the curve, going digital only while many printed papers, both university and commercial, are trying to keep both products alive. A year from now, we expect to have set a precedent for how to serve a campus community effectively online.
This precedent may be a tall order, but we at the Vision certainly believe we’ll have the tools to do it. With a large returning staff, we will dig deeper into the Belmont and Nashville communities. We’ll tell stories that really matter in these communities while communicating them in as many ways as possible and on a timeline that content truly deserves. Our presence may not be as physical as it once was – but trust us – it will still be there, and better than ever.
As always, we will still also strive to be the student’s news source, telling stories the Belmont community wants and needs, whether through words, photos, video, social media or in some way we’ve not thought of yet. We’ll be your outlet for news, features, sports and A&E on campus, whether what we report is good or bad, in the form of breaking news or a lengthier feature.
And of course, the Vision is always looking for new faces on staff, whether you want to take photos or videos, write stories or even start a blog. Our doors will always be open, so feel free to come by the second floor of Gabhart and stay awhile.
With your help, whether by reading our work, retweeting it to your followers or working with us, we will become the news organization that you want us to be and that we want to be. We will fulfill our job and duty to this community to keep Belmont informed, especially when our home can change drastically on a moment’s notice.
So before you head off campus or leave Nashville for the semester, bookmark us at belmontvision.com. Find us on Google Reader, or whatever RSS feed you have. Follow us on Twitter. Like us on Facebook. Do whatever you do on Google Plus. Those likes, follows and subscriptions, simple as they are, will be an investment for the future, both for you and for us. And your dividends from this new relationship will come around sooner than you think.
Brian Wilson, Vision editor, is a junior journalism major.