Welcome back, Pilots!
You may have noticed some changes to campus over the summer. The Lund Family Hall has gone up, a new Associate Vice President for Student Affairs has been hired, by the way, the purple newsstands that used to be sprinkled around The Bluff are gone.
Don’t get it twisted: The Beacon hasn’t gone anywhere. It will be better than ever in its new online-only format.
We have a sleek new website, a mobile app and more multimedia content. You will no longer have to wait until Thursdays to get the latest University of Portland news because our website will be updated every day, sometimes multiple times a day. We are ready to bring you content where you are, whether it’s on a phone, a tablet or a laptop, in real time.
But more important than how you read The Beacon is what you will read and the multimedia that goes with it.
No other media outlet, website or newspaper covers UP as thoroughly as The Beacon or knows UP as well as our staff members, your fellow students. The Beacon is the only news media outlet whose purpose is to serve as the voice of UP students.
Last year, The Beacon tackled serious topics like racial and gender inclusion, faculty salaries and mental health. We were also on the floor with Alec Wintering and the men’s basketball team when they beat BYU in Chiles Center and hung out backstage with AlunaGeorge and Bleachers! at Rock The Bluff.
Our goal is to tell the big stories as well as the ones that may get overlooked. Everyone has a story, and we want to use our powerful platform to share them. Over the past year, upbeacon.com had more than 230,000 page views. We expect that number to significantly increase this year.
It is our goal to give a voice to the voiceless. We can tackle the questions that you have about faculty, your classes and your peers, but don’t feel comfortable asking. We take our role seriously.
The Beacon strives to be accurate and fair while seeking and reporting the truth. We understand that we represent the UP community and the student body. When students felt that administration needed to give students a seat at the table in discussions about mental health and self care, a Beacon editorial urged the University to do so and they did, adding a student to the Ad Hoc Committee on Mental Health.
We aim to be accessible and accountable. If you have an idea, a topic of concern or a passion project, we want to hear from you. We fact check our content thoroughly, but no publication is perfect. We hold ourselves to professional standards, responding to positive and negative feedback while also making timely corrections.
You no longer need to seek us out on the newsstands. You can start one of our magazine-style stories before class, bookmark it on your phone, and finish it afterwards. You can watch a video recap before bed. The Beacon has served as the voice of the student body since 1935, and we’ve been engaging in conversation with our fellow students for just as long.
Remember, if something we publish happens to excite or infuriate you, we’re only an email, tweet or face-to-face conversation in the coffee line at The Commons away.
