As we create our final issue for the year of The Antelope, we’re 21 newspapers, nearly 300 articles and thousands of pictures deeper into covering the UNK campus. Final sentences written and stray oxford commas deleted, the journey this last year has taken us on is hard to ignore.
We started the year with many staff members taking on new positions. Within our new leadership, each of us worked to heighten the quality of our content, getting creative with what we produce.
On the sports side, our staff switched to a more timely format, getting the latest updates in UNK sports and featuring standout athletes. As our coverage was expanded, so was the media content we shared. Sports pictures were shared the day of or within a couple days of games. Athletes gravitated toward our social media pages because they knew they could see themselves playing their sport.
Apart from sports coverage, our team shone a light additional events and campus news on social media. Wanting to increase our engagement, we posted more photos from events as we covered them. Our Lopers Speak videos, our version of a word on the street type interview, consistently received engagement of over a thousand views.
Another big change for The Antelope this year came on our website. At the end of the spring 2023 semester, we switched over to our own server. After a process of trial and error, we are proud of making our website more inviting, cohesive and easy to navigate.
A lot of steps taken to make The Antelope more of a multimedia operation, and we’ve won awards while doing so. Apart from our social media, we’ve also added more media content to our website and highlighted that aspect of what we do.
Our advertising manager, also new to her position, created connections and made personalized messages to reach more customers. In turn, our advertising revenue has increased.
On the print side, The Antelope highlighted fun faces on campus through feature stories but also addressed controversial and difficult stories in the news. On top of that, we created a home delivery service. Those outside of the Kearney community are now able to receive UNK news right on their doorstep.
Despite working out of a temporary home for the last year and a half, we’ve adjusted to the change with stride. With both the heat of our newsroom and flooding at the start of the semester, we’ve pushed past challenges to continue doing what we do best. Our staff traveled to Atlanta, Georgia for the Fall National College Media Convention. After hearing from professionals and other student journalists, we took many new ideas back to UNK with us. Earlier this spring, we made our way to Wayne for the Golden Leaf Awards. Our hard work over the last year paid off, as we won Best Overall Newspaper, Best Overall Website, Best Overall Design and Best Social Media Presence.
These final few weeks will be spent packing up our newsroom and saying goodbye to the seniors leaving us. As we celebrate this past year, we’ll look ahead to the future, our newly renovated newsroom and our mission: no matter who is in our newsroom or what is happening at UNK, we will continue to bring news to UNK.
