It is no secret the world of journalism has changed dramatically over the past few years.  The legitimacy of journalism has been attacked by a “Fake News” movement. Professional publications continue to transition away from hard-copy and towards various online, digital and multimedia platforms.

To tackle the challenges in journalism today, The Standard has undergone recent and significant changes. The first change came with structure. Unlike past years where one student served as Editor-in-Chief for the whole publication, this year the position was split into two distinct roles: Editor-in-Chief: Print and Editor-in-Chief: Online. There is also a Managing Editor role to support both platforms. The position of photo editor changed to that of a multimedia editor, dedicated not only to capture captivating photos you will see in the newspaper but also photos, videos and infographics you can find on standard.asl.org and social media platforms.

These changes serve one new goal and direction: increase our online presence. In order to reaffirm the online presence and create a dynamic online platform, we felt a website redesign was necessary. There you will find a new look, where it’s easier to navigate the website and find your favorite sections, stories and author, along with new features and tools.

We added a calendar of the most important events in the school extra-curricular and otherwise, so you can engage with your community and know ahead of time when your conference time will be filled with an assembly. You can always keep updated with our content by subscribing to the website. Now, more than ever, print and online will have the same presence and play equal roles in our production.

Our aim is to be the best publication for this community. Your feedback and voice help us to do that. You can comment on our stories and share your perspective in guest articles. We have a “Contact Us” section where we hope to hear from you. This is your publication as much as it’s ours and to make that possible, we’re looking for your input.

Our commitment to outstanding journalism extends beyond the written word. We hope to provide engaging content, information and visuals through our social media outlets. This will also extend to the creation of a smartphone application within the year.

With this transition, we will maintain a high-quality and award-winning print newspaper. Over the past year, we have worked to create a newspaper with consistent and cohesive designs using a primary color throughout the issue. Instead of each section seeming isolated from one another, we wanted to create a newspaper that works together in covering a variety of subjects relevant to the ASL community. Additionally, we will incorporate more specialized mini-magazines, similar to the 2016 Presidential Election. These give us the opportunity to highlight the most important issues in the community from every angle, outside of our traditional newspaper.

Those will remain the most visible changes, but we have not ignored the heart of journalism: accurate, honest and engaging storytelling. We find it paramount to represent all the key angles, information and various opinions with thorough reporting. Finally, we maintain our strict guidelines for editing to deliver the news that matters crisply, effectively and most importantly, fairly.  Ultimately journalism is about storytelling. We’ve spent a lot of time to make the forums you see the stories the best they can be, all in hopes of helping you know what’s going on in your community.

Welcome to the new Standard. We hope you enjoy.

Written by Editor-in-Chief:Online Sourna Daneshvar Jr. and Editor-in-Chief:Print Michaela Towfighi