“The end of an era.” Might that be a good headline for the front page, suggests a colleague. It is the truth, but we shouldn’t give readers the impression that it’s the end of Observant. We’re (just) dropping the paper version.
Five more issues to go, five more papers to produce, five more phone calls to Simone, our graphic designer, shortening texts and designing covers. It feels strange. The first physical copy of Observant rolled off the presses on 6 October 1980 – the ‘news and opinion magazine of the State University of Limburg’, printed on A4, in black and white, and made up mostly of text.
Nobody had even heard of websites and search engines yet. There was news, people wrote letters, but newsletters?
For nearly 46 years, there have been thirty or forty issues a year, yes, “Observant, that little freebie on the stands”, as we’ve heard it referred to so often. It’s a somewhat sensitive subject, as to us, Observant is more than just a free paper. By diminishing it like that, you make it sound like something trivial, something thrown together in an afternoon. To us, it’s a proper newspaper that we have always worked hard to produce. I can’t remember (and neither can colleagues who were around in the early years) that we ever intentionally left a page blank, except when we absolutely had to (see the article on covid).
Paper is fantastic. After all, flipping through pages feel very different to scrolling through a digital text – just a shame about those black smudges on your fingers. But for years now, we have seen large stacks of the paper go untouched. Who are we producing those sixteen pages for, we wondered again a few months ago. With the large number of visitors to our website, followers on Instagram and knowing that we are the penultimate(!) university newspaper in the Netherlands that still prints a weekly paper, we have finally made the decision. Utrecht dropped their paper back in 2010, Rotterdam and Amsterdam (UvA) in 2018. Groningen’s UKrant stopped the previous year. It’s often not a voluntary decision: the money from the Executive Board dries up. And now we are very deliberately and completely voluntarily choosing to stop. It feels weird. Student freelancers are still delighted when they hear their article is appearing in print. It gives them something tangible, something they can send to mum and dad.
So, no more paper. I feel I can no longer ask my team to produce a newspaper with excellent articles, while at the same time being visible on the website, on social media, recording a podcast and putting together a newsletter. If I’m being honest, the physical paper has become something of a burden.
Five more issues to frame, the last of which will be a special. After the summer break, we will be back, as a newsletter emailed to all students and staff members. The contents won’t change, just the direction. This era requires change, exploring new avenues. We assume you’ll come along for the ride.
The editor-in-chief gives a look behind the scenes at the editorial office