Over the last year, I have had the privilege of directing a team of talented UA students as we embarked on a brand new adventure for The Crimson White.  It was an adventure full of laughs, taunts and tornado sirens. We were attacked by angry mobs of Million Dollar Band supporters, we fielded your questions about snow days and class cancelations and we asked for your opinion on issues like Four Loko, smoking on campus and Sarah Patterson’s nonexistent statue. Yes folks, we were the ever-present and theoretically all-knowing voice behind the Crimson White’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

This should come as no secret, seeing how our names are sort of plastered on the background of our Twitter page. However, it may be a surprise to many of you who use social media from your smartphone rather than your laptop. In addition to managing CW social media, my team hosted a table in the Ferguson Center every week during the year, visited several welcoming greek organizations at their dinners and chapter meetings, and worked with The SOURCE to provide student organizations with a streamlined way to contact our news editors for their stories.

As I close out my term as manager of The Crimson White’s community engagement team, I can truly say it has been a fantastic year. In my time at the University, I have never had the opportunity to work with so many different groups on our campus. This year on Twitter brought us an amazing conversation with @CreativeCampus leading up to Quidditch on the Quad, we broke major news stories with the help of student tweets and we integrated tweets to run in print alongside stories affecting student life. On Facebook we built a following that rivals larger schools such as University of Michigan and The Ohio State University. In terms of Facebook followers, we are one of the top five college newspapers in the country.

At the heart of all of these efforts was the desire to build a stronger campus community. This year’s staff and leadership knew that the student body needed to be more connected to the paper, and we were determined to make that happen. We wanted to know what you, the students, were thinking and talking about. We wanted greeks to know that this newspaper was here to represent their experiences on campus and we wanted even the smallest of student organizations to have the resources that they needed to get media coverage for their events and activities. We wanted people to feel that this newspaper cared about providing them with relevant news and responding to their concerns and inquiries.

On Twitter and Facebook in particular, we certainly saw the range of thoughts and opinions about the paper, and we did our best to address everyone’s concerns and be accepting of your ideas. I sincerely hope those of you who reached out to us this year felt that we cared about your issues and represented you as fairly and accurately as we could.

It would be wrong of me to claim all of our successes as my own. Our campus outreach and our social media efforts would not have been possible without the wonderful people I have worked with this year. Their expertise and connections on campus enabled us to make the progress we have made. I am proud to have been a part of this publication and this team. As next year’s staff takes over in the newsroom, I hope that you continue to tweet us, email us about your stories and share your comments online and on Facebook, so that together we can continue to develop the relationship between the student body and this newspaper.

Marion Steinberg was The Crimson White community engagement manager during the 2010 – 2011 school year.