Written by Khushi Khandelwal
This year, The Beaver has a Digital Editor for the first time. This does raise a very obvious question: what exactly counts as the newspaper anymore? The easiest answer would probably be the thing we print every three weeks. I like that answer, partly because I like physical newspapers. There is something very final about eventually sending an issue to print after weeks of edits and things being moved around the page by increasingly tiny amounts.
Our university is considerably less final. Things happen quickly at LSE, and we expect to find out about them almost as quickly. A protest can begin on Houghton Street in the morning and be all over Instagram by lunch. A lot can happen between two issues. That leaves a gap I want the Digital section to get much better at filling. If something is happening now, The Beaver should be able to cover it now. Speed is only one part of the process. I’m more interested in what happens to a story after it reaches print.
Last year, I would read something in The Beaver and wonder what else came out of an interview, or want to hear the writer talk about something they had spent weeks researching. A story inevitably loses things on its way to the final page. It just does.
I want us to pick up some of those loose threads: talk to our writers more, make video explainers, give Beaver Sound more of a presence, and make things that were always meant to be watched or listened to. So I suppose Digital stretches The Beaver slightly in both directions.
We can be quicker when campus refuses to wait for our next issue, and stick around when there is still more to say.
