Since 1898, The Argonaut has been providing the University of Idaho community with campus news. For most of that time, we printed a newspaper at least once and, for many years, twice a week. Now, after several years of publishing a paper for Thursday mornings, we’ve made history by completing our first semester as a digital-first publication, not a print one.
The first edition of our publication was topped with plain font which read “University Argonaut,” and was 32 pages of content meant for the UI community. Topics like politics, agriculture, football, the university president and much more were covered, and many of those same topics continue to be covered by us today.
Despite the changes in the look of our product over the years, The Arg’s role in the community remains the same. No other news outlet will cover the Vandal community like we will, and this is a community we are glad to be serving.
Other local news outlets might write about groundbreaking agricultural discoveries, new sports arenas or news university presidents, and while those events are important, they won’t be writing about the things that aren’t quite so high up on the priority list.
UI has a number of different communities under the umbrella of their student body, and The Arg serves as way for these communities to make their voice heard. Black students, LGBTQ+ students and students with disabilities are just a few of the groups who we strive to make heard.
In a 1971 issue of the Idaho Argonaut, page 15 featured an article highlighting the increase in minority communities at the university, saying Black enrollment was the highest of them. In a 1988 edition, minority enrollment made news again with an 11% increase since the previous fall.
In February 2000, the Diversity Education Center made the front page with news that they were finding a temporary main office while a new one was being built. The story was accompanied with a graphic showing the increase in minority students on campus. Last month, we reported on UI’s enrollment numbers for the fall 2021 semester and addressed how minority communities were reflected in UI’s enrollment and retention rates.
Other news outlets won’t cover this type of information which is essential to the university community as a whole, and this publication has been doing it for years. And we’re proud to keep doing it.
While we don’t always have the number of staff, knowledge or resources to be able to cover everything happening on campus, we do our best to cover the news we think matters to our community the most. After all, we are students, too.
Whether we are publishing in print or on our website, The Arg is here to serve our community in the best way we can. In order to keep serving the staff, faculty and others who preferred our print editions, we still publish content we believe is valuable to the community in special print editions published roughly every month.
Embracing the mass use of social media and the internet by the student body is a large part of serving news and more UI’s students. Being able to transform with our audience is the ideal solution to declining readership of our print paper by the student body, as well as coping with the increasing stress levels of all students who feel the intense pressures of modern adult life.
Going digital seemed the most logical path when the spring semester ended, and from our experiences this semester it is not a decision we will regret. We hope the rest of the Vandal community won’t either.
We want to keep serving this unique community the way we have for the past decade, and this time we are making history by doing it digitally. We hope you’ll join us along this journey and continue to read, support and educate our staff on the way.
–Editorial Board