A Letter From the Editor-in-Chief
The fall 2019 Caravel staff at the conclusion of our semester’s general staff meeting.
Dear readers,
Since our founding five years ago this month, the Caravel has dedicated its efforts toward a tripartite mission: reporting the underreported, empowering our writers with valuable journalism skills and regional expertise, and remaining at the forefront of the practice of international journalism. It is my pleasure today to announce and explain to you the various changes we have made to this newspaper over the past year.
All these changes—made with careful consideration, passionate debate within our executive team, and thoughtful input from our staff at all levels—we make to better fulfill the needs on our campus and best serve our organizational mission moving forward. To grow our organization, to ensure we attract and maintain a diverse and well-rounded staff, and to live up to our mission, we have developed entire new lines of content and embraced bold and exciting new technologies and reporting methods.
The first, and most visible, change to the Caravel is our updated website. Our executive team worked with programmers for a year to develop a website with a better user interface that highlights the full breadth of our coverage, easily, accessibly, and attractively. A reader can now search for individual writers, regions, topics, and themes with greater ease. The new website also allows us to better integrate our various forms of media, including our newsletters, into one cohesive, sleek, and visually pleasing platform. I can also guarantee you, from the publishing side, our staff can now upload articles faster and with less hassle than previously, providing our readers with better and more up-to-date content.
Beyond updating our website to a more modern, reader-friendly interface, the Caravel has also embraced email newsletters as an exciting new medium of reporting. We premiered our first newsletter in fall 2017 with the original Caravel Compass, which aimed to briefly capture critical news from each geographic region and give readers a snapshot of events occurring around the world that they might not encounter in mainstream media. We eventually reformatted and rebranded our Compass flagship into Compass World, while also adding Compass Gender, Compass Money, and Compass Futures to devote more focused coverage to gender and sexuality; business and economics; and science, technology, and medicine, respectively. Each newsletter aims to specifically discuss a critical theme in more depth than our region-specific general news stories, while also expanding our reach to attract journalists from more diverse backgrounds and readers with more diverse interests.
To continue our expansion of coverage and material, the Caravel conceptually restructured our Anchor section, now the United States, and fundamentally expanded our Opinion section. Originally focusing on Georgetown events, the Anchor served as a means for our newspaper to cover local events without focusing on the United States, which we felt detracted from our mission of covering underreported events in light of the United States’ inescapable prominence in global reporting. However, after careful consideration, we felt we could best serve our mission and our readers by converting the Anchor into the U.S.A. section, which will focus on underreported U.S. news. This change will allow us to fully cover the entire globe for the first time, while also staying true to our organizational mission. We reiterate our commitment to not fall into the trap of covering the same news beat to death every day by the mainstream media the world over. The U.S.A. section, we hope and expect, will provide our readers with unexpected news from and insightful commentary about the United States.
Our last exciting announcement is the creation of the Editorial Board and the establishment of a new, clearer set of rules for opinion content. In our first five years, the Caravel chose to focus almost exclusively on objective news to establish our organization, build our reputation with readers, and convey our unyielding principles of good journalism. Having achieved these goals over the past years, the newspaper has gradually expanded our opinion content, culminating in the creation of the Opinion editor this past year and the formation of the Editorial Board. The Opinion editor will ensure opinion pieces published in our newspaper follow our high standards, advance a meaningful and thoughtful argument, and preserve our organizational objectivity and journalistic integrity, which means that our journalists may not write objective news articles on topics they have recently covered with opinions. As it stands, the Caravel is pleased to announce we are open to ideas for opinion pieces from all our journalists, staff, and readers!
The Editorial Board, the other critical development of the past year, will include members of the staff, executive team, and editors to best reflect a wide range of expertise in both world regions and interregional themes. Much like a conventional newspaper editorial board, it will discuss critical events and provide a measured and meaningful take on the situation. Our Editorial Board already has written about such topics as marriage equality in Asia, white savior syndrome in Africa, wealth privilege during the university admissions process in the United States, and the problems with the debate over climate change science. Crafted and composed by our most seasoned writers, the works of the Editorial Board will provide our readers with thought-provoking—perhaps even groundbreaking—ideas on a range of critical topics spanning the full breadth of the globe.
We make these changes for the benefit of our staff and readers. On behalf of the Caravel, I thank all of you that have opened, read, and shared our work. I look forward to the next five, ten, and fifty years of our organization and the changes they will surely bring! I hope you do too.
Sincerely,
Felipe Lobo Koerich
Editor-in-Chief