Dear John Doe,

We set out this year to make our newspaper more accessible for all students, staff, and members of the community, and decided that we could most effectively do this by moving all of our resources online.

This switch allows important news to reach you quickly, easily, and at your discretion, which is the embodiment of our 110-year-old mission statement: “For a Better Tennessee High.”

So far, it’s allowed us to report on a variety of topics and truly be on the pulse of what’s going on around us. Without the limitations of writing for a print issue a month in advance, we’re able to publish an article about something the same day it happened.

But like you said, it’s unfortunate that there’s not really a space for physical news media in the world right now. It’s impossible to keep up with everything going on around us, especially when people prefer to read about it digitally.

Regardless, we will still continue to print a couple of issues every year, because I think that abandoning them completely disregards the tradition we’ve followed for over a century now.

Furthermore, the “death of physical media” says a lot about the hyperactivity of our world: the fact that we attach ourselves to so many fads that are gone as soon as they arrive.

We’ve discarded the tangible, the long-lasting, for the fleeting. As a society, we’re so often seeking the next best thing to pique our interests that we lose sight of what’s in front of us.
It feels like, overall, we don’t care about things as much as we used to. We don’t live with things, we don’t let them simmer.

Physical media is meant to momentarily spend your life with you: your newspaper is supposed to eat breakfast with you every morning, your book is supposed to travel around the world with you, your favorite vinyl records are supposed to stay spinning as background noise for hours.

The state of how we engage with media in general is disappointing at best. That’s why I think that having both an online and printed presence is so crucial: it shows that both can coexist.

Once again, thank you for the support towards our paper and new website. Stay tuned for an article about the death of physical media—there’s so much more to say.

Best,