Happy New Year to all! Well, we've made it to 2012 and already things are shaping up to be very interesting. We have Spring classes starting in January, Mass Effect 3 coming out in March, the Presidential Elections in November and, if you believe crazy people, the end of the world in December! What more could we possibly want to look forward to? However, with all of this anticipation for the impending horizon, The Lion's Roar Newspaper has something new for its readers this year that is here and now.
As you probably noticed, we have changed a few things here and there, mostly to make the technical things easier on ourselves so we can focus on making this newspaper a great read for you. While we changed many, if not all, of the little things, the first three pages of the newspaper were our focus during the makeover.
As you look at the masthead, notice that it is less busy than our previous one. We cut the fat and refined the look. Those pesky skyboxes, which always gave us trouble during layout, are now gone and have been replaced by a simple, but attractive index. On the bottom of the page, we replaced the single weather box with three boxes showing where we're at online, the weather on the day of publication and the day after and a special box to remind you of important dates and events coming up.
After the front page, page two is probably the most read page of the paper because that's where we publish submitted blurbs from student organizations, what we call "Org News." While this will continue, the page will now be known as "Campus Life" instead of "Orgs and News." We decided to make this change to create new elements that will make The Lion's Roar more like a college newspaper and less a normal, boring newsletter. We're nailing down the details, but expect to see top 10 lists, DIYs and maybe even a fashion column in the coming weeks.
Finally, page three, the page you're on now, has been reworked to make student opinions shine just as brightly as our staff's. We shortened our column space to make room for a bigger "Speak Out" column and a few other things. We really didn't see the point of 800 word opinion pieces.
Be sure to let us know what you think of the paper's new look on Facebook, by email or by phone. Thanks for reading and, again, Happy New Year!
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