The entire Hatchet staff meets every week to discuss what we are doing well, and where we need to improve. At these meetings, people from all sections are present and can offer praise or criticism of all sections, so it’s not unusual for an news editor to make a comment about the arts section, a photo editor to comment on the features section, and so forth.

At this week’s meeting, we all worked together and decided on some additions we’d like to see in the news section. While I can’t promise you’ll see all of these changes happen immediately, you should start to see some of them in the coming weeks.

Among the changes we plan on implementing are:
– expanded Metro coverage
– the addition of regular sections (as seen in the Life and Arts sections)
– more series articles
– more national stories with a GW angle
– more news-features

We also plan on contacting different academic departments on a regular basis to find out if any of their students or faculty are working on interesting projects or research. Last year, I called SEAS and asked if anyone was doing any interesting work – they told me about a student who was building a roller coaster, and another who took a job doing top-secret national intelligence work. Today I called SEAS and again asked what they’re up to.

One thing I don’t think that all students realize is that other Hatchet editors and I strive to make this paper interactive. We don’t want to just be shooting articles at the student body; we want to hear from students and include their suggestions in the paper. That’s one of the reasons we have this blog. I’d say that almost every time a student suggests an idea for an article (not just a press release), we wind up looking into it. If you have any ideas or suggestions about things you’d like to see in the paper, I’d encourage you to post them now. As we are working on some changes in the news section, we want to hear from students about what they’d like to see more of or less of in our pages.