By: Grace Hamilton

The face of news — and more importantly for us, the face of Newswire — is changing. The rules of the land have been made very clear: Adapt or go extinct. And I know for sure that myself and my colleagues at Newswire have no intention of going out with anything so much as a whimper. 

If I were more prone to lean into my boomer beliefs and tendencies, I would probably say something along the lines of, “Pack it up, folks. Serious journalism is dead. I’m throwing in the towel and purchasing a one-way ticket to the Buzzfeed offices, since it seems like that’s where we’re headed anyway.” 

Newswire isn’t making a straight plunge down the toilet bowl of news reporting, but this new direction does admittedly scare me. And I say this because, truly, I am an old person — I’m 22 — who can no longer work the Internet. 

Xavier Newswire, if you hadn’t heard, is making the big switch by getting rid of our tried and true PDF format and refocusing a lot of our efforts on social media. It’s what everyone is doing, so Xavier isn’t charting a new path or reinventing the wheel here, but it’s still scary.

When I was a first-year at Xavier, we had a print newspaper. An actual old-fashioned newspaper with eight to 12 pages and fresh ink. By my junior year, the paper I knew and loved was gone, replaced by a weekly email that students never checked, linking to a newspaper they didn’t read. 

Whatever happened to the news? 

I, like a lot of people, get a good portion of news from TikTok — and I am so embarrassed to admit that. The news I hear about there, however, I check and research against established sources. My parents used to subscribe to my hometown’s newspaper, The Akron Beacon Journal and the Chicago Tribune. Now, we don’t have any papers delivered, and I don’t think we’re even subscribed to any online editions. 

As the world changes, we find that it’s easier and more successful to focus on an online format. Social media is where the most engagement and advertisement can be the most effective. Follower counts can translate to actual readers, and if you want to survive in that world, you have to adapt. 

I understand that, but I don’t have to like it. 

There was a time when Buzzfeed reigned supreme in the news world. Everyone knows Buzzfeed entertainment, with its quirky listicles and posts stolen straight from Tumblr — all cobbled together by an office of millennials bemoaning man-spreading and going into work naked and covered in paint. But few know of Buzzfeed News, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative, serious reporters. Buzzfeed News was shuttered in 2023, and its legacy is not one of an upstart news organization that could successfully report the news through a social media-centered lens, but that of a cringey and uncreative team of hipsters who didn’t realize when they became the joke itself, instead of the ones telling it. 

We’re not in the same vein as Buzzfeed — we’re a college newspaper pandering to the whims of a generation addicted to their news arriving in five minute video formats or infographics on Instagram. In so many ways, it’s a benefit that the news has become so much more accessible, instead of relying on biased corporations bought out by governments and owned by billionaires.

There is no freedom without freedom of the press, but as we’ve seen, that freedom is becoming more and more restricted, leading to the necessity of Minecraft libraries — check out the Uncensored Library — and TikToks of people unable to actually say the word “genocide” to describe an honest-to-God genocide. What a world. 

Adapt or die. Newswire intends to adapt, but it leads one to wonder what news will look like in another four years. I’ve seen the change from an actual paper to a PDF to an Insta-focused Newswire, and I’ve loved Newswire through all of it. But in another four years, what happens when budgets are continuously whittled away, as tuition increases and, truly, people stop caring what any and all news has to say? 

I don’t have the answers. It’s not surprising that we had to make this switch, that my work as an editor has changed from paper and ink editing to designing Instagram posts in Canva and coming up with ideas for reels. It’s not surprising, but it is a little disappointing for someone who remembers how it used to be — not that long ago. 

All I ask, I suppose, is that you make an effort to care about the news. We’re living in a world where it’s more important to remain informed, because so many people are lying to our faces. There is no freedom without freedom of the press. And Newswire will continue to play its part by ensuring that the press remains credible and trustworthy. The rest is up to you.

I think our job is to ensure not only the freedom of the press, but its very existence.