Kevin Thomas is the Editor-in-Chief for the Newswire. He is a senior English and Philosophy double major from St. Louis.

Every summer campus goes through more changes than any of us can pay attention to. Sure, the big ones like the HUB are obvious, but there are dozens of little changes like the signs inside Gallagher being a different font. These changes are small aesthetic differences that we might not notice until a few months after they happen, leaving us wondering when that happened, whatever that is.

Here at the Newswire, we haven’t gone through many aesthetic changes. Our masthead and layout are the same. Our website is going through a complete makeover to make it more accessible, but the print copy that you pick up from whatever scattered location around campus looks the same, with the exception of minor flourishes from our excellent new staff.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t plan on changing things up in new and exciting ways, because we will be doing our fair share of that. However, the changes that we want to make are different from the aesthetic (other than the significant changes to take place on our website). But we hope that they will be noticeable ones and, because our job is to report on the news and it’s not quite ethical for us to write about ourselves, you can learn about the changes in this piece right here.

Our primary goal for this upcoming year is increasing our presence in the communities we’re a part of in terms of people actually seeing our faces. We don’t want to be some kind of journalistic gremlins haunting the campus, doing layout on Tuesday nights in our windowless office on the second floor of Gallagher and then distributing the papers on Wednesday morning. Even though this is what we already are.

So, we’re working to change this in the student journalism community by co-hosting a conference in September with UC to talk about journalism with six or seven other schools from southwest Ohio. This event is going to be the first of its kind. It will be a way for us to not only get know our colleagues in the region, but also to learn more tricks and tools that we can use to do our jobs better, to make sure that you, the student body, always knows exactly what’s going on, who is affected and when it will happen. Or, just to give you a better understanding of the campus through featured articles spotlighting certain aspects of campus.

We’re also starting an internship program through the Newswire that will help build stronger bonds between members of our staff and people who are interested in joining. This program is something that we are still working on, but we hope to have it completed by Club Day.

Those two internal projects are the biggest changes we’re making as an overall staff, but it doesn’t count the changes that our new editors always make to their pages. It doesn’t count the individual flavor of each writer and copy editor that comes through our office, but those changes are much harder to identify and promote simply because they’re nuanced and way too many to list.

However, I still want these minor changes brought about by the personalities of our staff to become something noticed, so I want to invite you, our readers, to come and hang out with us, give us story ideas and comments on what you thought of the paper.

While there may not always be someone in our office (except on Tuesday nights, when we’ll be there from 3 p.m. until around midnight or so), we are always around on campus and can be reached fairly easily at xaviernewswire.com. But our office is still the best place to find us, so come on down. We’re located on the second floor of Gallagher, in the hallway almost no one walks down and is the first door on the left-hand side. It may be windowless, but we could still go on a walk and swing on those new bench swings that finally got placed around campus.