Thank you for reading The George-Anne and offering your observations.

The decision to reduce printing of The George-Anne  to once a week was made because of lack of revenue from advertisers in our print product, a reality that every newspaper in America is facing. It is now very unusual for a college newspaper to print more than once a week. However, we had processes in place already for our shift to digital news to continue to grow, and it has.

I feel that The George-Anne is better today than it was a couple of years ago. More content is produced by every section on a daily basis. The amount of investigative journalism that has been published in the past two years, is higher than it was before. The George-Anne is also very active on social media. On a recent Saturday, we had four reporters live-tweeting from separate events, something that we haven’t done in the past.

Our Street Team, the students who hand out newspapers, is unusual for college media. They hand out about 2,700 papers on Thursdays and another crew distributes more on Monday. Unfortunately, when a member gets sick or is absent and isn’t replaced in time, we might see some leftover papers at times.

We have also had cases in which too many papers have been sent to a location, like the stadium. We try our best to ensure these mistakes don’t happen and are corrected as soon as possible.

As I stated above, our online audience continues to grow. Here are some numbers that we are really proud of:

–In the five weeks from Jan. 29 through March 4,thegeorgeanne.com averaged 9,140 pageviews per week (source: Google Analytics).

–In the first four weeks of March, 26,993 unique users saw George-Anne content on Facebook (source: Facebook Data Insights).

–The @thegeorgeanne Twitter account had 7,073 followers as of March 30, 2018.

–In February, 2,400 users visitedreflectorgsu.com (source: Google Analytics).

–In the first four weeks of March, 1,789 Facebook users viewed Circle video (source: Facebook Data Insights.)

Recently, in an attempt to outreach to clubs, we had our first “Club Officers’ Publicity Day” and provided online forms for club officers to submit information. We plan to have similar events for departments in the next year.

The George-Anne has changed and will continue to change for the students, but the one thing that will remain constant is our pursuit of the truth and that our coverage will continue to improve.

Feel free to contact me at gaeditor@georgiasouthern if you or anyone else would like to talk about The George-Anne and our coverage. I encourage conversation because I know for sure that we are not perfect, but our goal is to serve the student body the best way we can and we are open to hearing from you.