Middlebury Magazine Editor Matt Jennings was working on the problem of spring 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic forced Vermont campus to go away in March.
"We knew immediately, there would be a budget impact." Jennings said. "We knew the financial impact of sending students home."
To avoid permits or dismissals, Middlebury College required all departments to be operating budgets by 40 percent, Jennings said. For its part, the Communications and Marketing Office opted to suspend the production of the Alumni magazine.
"Paper, printing and postage are the largest budget elements in the department, so it was obvious," Jennings said.
more popular
the decision It turned out to be a blessing disguised. Released from the quarterly programming of the print edition, Jennings and the team of it could focus on developing the digital presence of the magazine. Middlebury Magazine already had a website, which consists mainly of selected stories of the printed edition; Jennings saw the Hiatus publication as an opportunity to increase digital content.
He started publishing features stories on the website as soon as they were finished instead of finishing them to coincide with the print schedule. He added videos and a series of podcast called "alone together", with several campus constituents who discuss their pandemic experience. He introduced "offices", a collection of colorful weekly, which crawled at the monthly vignettes of the faculty, students and students of Middlebury, students from all over the world. googleg.cmd.push (function () googleg.display ("dfp -ad-article_in_article"););
"There were things that we could do online that we did not have in the printed version," he said. "That's what the pandemic allowed us to experiment." "
'the budget of the pandemic'
like many facets of academe, Alumni magazines have been forced to be reduced in the Covid-19 era. Budget cuts provoked Some institutions reduce the number of printing problems they produce each year; others, such as Middlebury, temporarily stopped the publication of hard copies completely.
Either way, the staff of the Alumni magazine finally " He had to deal with his websites, "said the founder of Capstone Communications Erin Peterson, a consultant for an independent and independent school. Magazines, if it considers that 90 to 95 percent of the publications of students already have a presence on the web, The sites are often rudimentary, offering little more than pdf of the pages of the printed edition, he said. With the deleted printing as an option, the universities had no choice but to improve their digital offers.
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Michelle Tedford, Executive Editorial Director of University of Dayton Alumni, Accredita "The budget of the Pandemic "To push your staff to maximize your digital narrative skills. Instead of producing four editions printed per year as usual, for fiscal years 2021 and 2022, it was assigned only with sufficient funds to publish two printing problems and a single digital. The most recent number of only online, summer 2021, added additional content, including an enlarged version of the regular function "Now Lee, See, Listen to this", which shows the achievements of the authors of the exalumnos, the filmmakers, the Musicians and the like and integrated videos, animation and other multimedia effects.
"Actually, as a staff we stretch our experience and we find different ways of doing the P
