This semester, we dove into campus safety, tackled cafeteria and dorm rumors, shared Student Senate meetings with the rest of campus and pushed for renovation and construction plans.
And it paid off at MediaFest22 in Washington D.C.
Due to a snafu, The Antelope was judged among schools with 15,000 or more students that have buildings and news teams with over 150 student workers dedicated to their campus newspapers. UNK has 6,000 students and 20 Antelope staff members (on a good day).
Despite the odds, we placed seventh with our 24-page paper, a feat our current staff has never attempted before.
Our sports team spent months cultivating a series of articles to highlight UNK’s switch to the MIAA from the RMAC a decade ago. Our back page is dedicated weekly to the action that our photographers capture at numerous Loper sporting events.
Behind the scenes, our advertising team had a record-breaking semester by selling over $2,500 worth of ads.
Our designers, reporters, editors, managers, photographers and videographers are growing a valuable program and gaining experience that will aid them after graduation. UNK should be proud of these students and aid them on their academic journey.
The Antelope is the best that it’s been in over 10 years.
Though we would like to keep celebrating, the students on our staff realize the adversity that we face next semester. As the newsroom transitions to University Residence South, we ask that the UNK community keeps listening to students and answering our phone calls.
We are extremely grateful to the students and UNK officials who are willing to speak with our reporters. We value their time to answer our questions because as students, we understand what it means to be busy.
There may be times when the office head feels unqualified to answer some of our questions. Most of the time, their solution is to defer us to the director of marketing and communications at UNK.
We would prefer hearing straight from the related office’s director. This is the most like reporting in the real world and serves us best as we pursue experiential learning.
“I don’t know” is a perfectly honest answer. This is the answer that tells us that as reporters, we need to confirm with the university’s spokesperson.
As The Antelope prepares rookie reporters for “the real world,” we are bound to stumble along the way. We are young. We will make mistakes.
Aside from our journalistic duties as a school newspaper, The Antelope is a required class within the curriculum for all Communication Department students. When officials don’t answer our questions, it risks our grades and keeps us from valuable reporting experiences.
We ask for patience and understanding as we do our best to keep our organization and our peers accountable.
In return, The Antelope will have patience in moving to University Residence South. We wish the planning process would have gone differently. But at this point, it’s time to move on and prepare our production team for this spring.
To help things run more smoothly, The Antelope students have offered to help the communication department move items to the old Greek dorms. We have organized and archived our papers, and soon, we will have to pack up our photo wall, decorations and personal items that make the newsroom our home.
The Antelope won’t let a change of scenery stop production, and we look forward to the day when we can return to an even better library building.
Until January, we would like to thank our readers, professors, advisers, staff, graduating team members and the UNK officials who answer our questions.
