The last issue of CBS OBSERVER was the last issue of the paper – on paper. This is the launch – or re-launch, if you checked out cbsobserver.dk before it was closed down in February – of CBS OBSERVER as CBS’ editorially independent web-media. We are committing ourselves to bring daily news and in-depth articles in English to at least the same extent as in the printed version and to send out weekly English-language newsletters.
Development in progress
CBS OBSERVER is dead – long live CBS OBSERVER. cbsobserver.dk – this present incarnation of CBS OBSERVER’s website – is actually also soon to be extinct. The website that you are reading this article on is not the website that will be lifting the full inheritance of both CBS’ in-house university newspaper through 32 years and this – its supplementary online news ‘bulletin board’ through a year and a half – in the future. This is just the starting point.
Even though we are up and running we still have more loose ends than we have ends tied up, and more keep appearing. Not wanting to promise more than we can keep, we here present a quick overview of changes, challenges and what to expect through the coming months.
The international commitment
The most immediate and relevant change from cbsobserver.dk will be the English language content of CBS OBSERVER’s new, improved online version. That was – to put it mildly – never raised to anything near a satisfactory level through the 18 month existence of cbsobserver.dk. As CBS OBSERVER, the online university newspaper will be committed to maintain at least the printed paper’s 20-30 percent English-language content consisting of both dedicated in-depth articles targeting internationals at CBS and translated rewrites of the articles in Danish.
English language newsletter
The printed CBS OBSERVER arrived in your letterbox every month. The online CBS OBSERVER’s newsletter will arrive in your CBS-mail’s in-box every week – yours and that of every other member of CBS’ staff and student body. The first time you get it, it will be in both Danish and English, and you’ll have to follow a link and check a box in order to get the English language newsletter in future. Please do so.
CBS OBSERVER is strapped for resources and needs to attract all the income it can generate. Both the website and the newsletter will contain CBS-relevant advertising. So though we’d prefer to dwell on all the good reasons to not only receive but actually read CBS OBSERVER’s newsletter we are obliged to point out that you can delete yourself from the recipient list easily and at any time. But please don’t.
Journalistically learning by doing
The central mission and vision remain what they have always been. CBS OBSERVER will focus sharply on all aspects of CBS and on the basis of common journalistic criteria supply the best mix of need-to-know, nice-to-know and fun-to-know content that the editorial staff can generate. But though the criteria of relevance are the same, journalism for a paper is not quite the same as journalism for the web. We will have to evolve journalistically, and this will be a learning by doing process over time.
The printed CBS OBSERVER’s English language content was primarily written by international full-degree students on a freelance basis. On top of facing the abovementioned development process, CBS OBSERVER has run into complications regarding its employment of students on a freelance basis. This meant that all freelance activities have been suspended since October 1st.
Until this has been sorted out there is only one person – yours truly – to write or translate, edit and rewrite the English language content, so it might be a little hard to fully live up to our commitment right from the beginning.
From ‘bulletin board’ to web-newspaper
CBS OBSERVER’s website as it is today was never meant to stand on its own. It was designed to primarily be the news oriented, online supplement to the newspaper. In order to fully lift the inheritance of both the paper and the online news ‘bulletin board’ on its own, the website is in dire need of a graphic overhaul, giving it a more professional, dynamic and ‘web-newspaper-like’ design. If all goes well and we have the resources to do this, this is planned to happen around the start of the spring semester 2011.
But the budget is tight, very tight. CBS OBSERVER came out of 2009 with a deficit of DKK 265,000. The timely closing down of the newspaper here in October might enable us to whittle this down by up to a third of the deficit this year, but this still leaves a sizeable deficit, an appropriation from CBS that shows no probability of growing and the need to invest in the development of the website
Changes, challenges and things to come – we’ll do the very best we can. We also hope you’ll drop by on an ongoing basis to keep abreast of what’s happening to and at CBS. Your comments and contributions will be welcome.
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