Your newspaper needs your help. Our newspaper has been around since 1884 – that’s only a few years younger than Mississippi State University itself. We’ve seen wars, cultural turmoil and lots of mediocre football. If your grandparents went to MSU they probably read The Reflector, and if your parents went here they probably read it too.
Over this time, the process of making a newspaper has changed in few ways, but with the advent of the Internet, things have made a big change. Today, many of our readers read the news online, or pick up the newspaper and then go to our Web site to weigh in on the stories through our comments section. There’s an abundance of new opportunities through social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
College students are often on the cutting edge of these new media sites and this is seen in the ways they use them. We use the Internet in new and creative ways and are passionate about finding even more. With this in mind, we at The Reflector have been making a concerted effort to use these new forms of communication to get you the news in even faster, creative and more interesting ways in addition to the newspaper you’ve become familiar with.
The students at Mississippi State and people in Starkville are a news-savvy group. The number of people who read our printed paper is comparable to some schools with more than 10,000 students. Our Web site traffic also is consistently in the top tier of page views for college publications. We’re working to continue this innovation through our use of downloadable audio like podcasts, up-to-the-minute updates through Twitter and Facebook.
So, what does this mean to you? It means we at The Reflector are dedicated to continuing to serve the MSU community in as many and as effective ways as possible. Even though we only publish on Tuesdays and Fridays, we intend to keep you as informed as possible through the use of these new media forms as soon as the news happens, and on the days we do publish, we try to run stories which are oriented toward the MSU students and community in a way that only a student-run university newspaper can.
This is where you come in. We want your feedback on these new outlets. Join our Facebook fan page, follow us on Twitter, visit and comment on our Web site and let us know what you think. Our most pressing function is to serve you, our audience, and if you feel like there are ways we could improve, we need to know.
We’re working hard to give you the best quality product and with your help we are looking to make that product even better. To weigh in on what you like, dislike or how you feel about this, send an e-mail to [email protected].
Kyle Wrather is the editor in chief of The Reflector. He can be contacted at [email protected].