From the Editor: The Runner’s goals for the new year
Art by Mikayla Croucher
New Year’s resolutions — you either love or hate them. They can be seen as a way to accomplish personal goals, improve your mindset, and keep you motivated, or as goals that have a higher probability of failure and usually don’t make it past January.
I strongly believe resolutions can serve a great purpose for either yourself or your workplace to help achieve goals for the year ahead, and make it past January!
It’s important to be realistic with your resolutions so you can complete your goals throughout the year by making a plan and sticking to it. At The Runner, there are a few resolutions that we have in mind for the new year.
Weekly videos on TikTok
In August, we hired Social Media Reporter Sukhmani Sandhu to make videos for The Runner and keep up with our social media. Due to The Online News Act restricting access to our social media, we have been shifting our online engagement to our TikTok account, @runnermag, to increase awareness of the newspaper and the stories we cover.
Throughout 2024, you will see weekly TikToks on our page, ranging from street interviews with Kwantlen Polytechnic University students to participating in trends that fit with our paper. We have seen people engaging with trends, such our fall season at KPU TikTok reaching over 14,000 views, your aesthetic according to your zodiac sign with almost 2,000 views, and our most recent video retelling a humour story regarding Ryan Reynolds with over 1,800 views, so that is something we want to do more of this year.
You can still find us on Twitter and YouTube.
Increase readership for our newsletter, The Rundown
The Runner launched The Rundown, a bi-weekly newsletter to give a glimpse into the latest stories and events important to KPU students in September last year. The newsletter gives people access to our latest stories and goes straight to your inbox.
Our Web Manager, Rachel De Freitas, added a feature on our website that allows readers to sign up to the newsletter list. We have seen a lot of interest in the newsletter since it launched, with 19 people currently signed up.
This year, our goal is to increase The Rundown’s readership by spreading more awareness during events like Student Resource Fair, previously known as Welcome Week, and journalism class visits when discussing how to join The Runner. With high readership already, I hope to see it continue to grow throughout the year.
NASH86 conference — apply the skills we learned
NASH is an annual conference where student journalists across Canada come together to learn from experts and develop skills through workshops while connecting with others who work in student newspapers. This year, NASH86 is taking place at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) in Edmonton with student newspaper The Nugget as the host.
The Runner has attended NASH for years, and the few who can attend record the workshops and take notes to share with the rest of the team. We learn so much about other newspapers and acquire new skills to apply or think about when reporting. This year, since we have many new members on the team, I am hoping for us to engage in the content after the conference and apply it to the stories we write in 2024 and onwards.
One way is for our staff to go through the recordings and notes, gathering their own thoughts on the workshops. After this, we will hold a meeting to see what people took away from the workshops, what we already do well, and how we can apply new knowledge to stories we cover in the future.
We hope that doing this will demonstrate how we can improve on reporting for the stories you read, realize different approaches we can take, and practice the skills we learn at NASH.
I’m excited to see what 2024 has in store for us and discover new opportunities that may arise. We have a strong team, both staff and contributors, and I can’t wait to see what stories, videos, photos, and art we produce this year. I look forward to the new faces who will join over the next year. We thank you for your continued support in KPU’s student newspaper.
