THE ROTUNDA’S REFLECTION

“I joined The Rotunda before the pandemic, and I loved the working culture,” said Editor-in-Chief of Longwood University’s student-led paper Nick Robinson. “It made me sad when we fell out of that culture during the pandemic; I didn’t see a bright future for The Rotunda if we kept doing things the way we did last year,” he commented during our interview.

The Rotunda has been a media outlet for over 100 years, reporting on local, state, and national news, entertainment, opinions and more. However, they stopped publishing during the coronavirus lockdown.  

Robinson commented that because of the pandemic he felt the culture within the organization began to shift. “Before the pandemic, I felt like we were like, really driven to, you know, push out a quality newspaper every single week,” he said. “I feel like the pandemic kind of made us a little bit lazy. And so that’s one thing I wanted to change when I became the editor-in-chief,” Robinson said. 

Getting the organization back on track as a “professional organization” is key because “we do provide a service to the campus. We exist to provide the campus with news,” he said.

One of the major contributors to the change in culture, in addition to impact of the surge in the coronavirus,was the graduation of many of the club’s seniors and the staff’s inability to recruit during a pandemic. 

“The number of students who were working on creating content for the paper shrunk instantly once everyone went online,” said club advisor Jeff Halliday. “If there’s no one making content, there’s no paper to produce.”The Rotunda is lacking staff in key roles across the board. Copy, news, opinion, and art and entertainment column editors are needed. Positions are also open in Rotunda Studios, the paper’s videography and digital editing production arm.

When asked what his plans were to try and bring back the working culture that was present before the pandemic, Robinson shared that he started reinforcing deadlines for writers and photographers, and most importantly, maintaining those deadlines. To do so, the staff are not publishing articles of poor quality. Also, they are making sure that everyone has something to work on in order to encourage productivity, and they are focusing on recruiting new members.

Regarding the need to stay productive, one of those staff members, Feature Editor Victoria Thompson stated that “Features, for me, are about events and things happening currently, and since there weren’t a lot of events due to COVID-19, there wasn’t a lot to write about.”

Coming back in person has allowed The Rotunda to somewhat return to “normal”. They are now able to produce a monthly edition that recaps the events of that past month. Thompson mentioned that she was excited to get back to writing articles about the Longwood community. “My column, I think, specifically offers that sense of community [here] at Longwood,” she commented.

Dr. Alec Hosterman, co-advisor of The Rotunda, advises the student photographers. While the team of photographers did meet during the pandemic, their meetings were “more sporadic and spaced out,” said Hosterman. This year, they are meeting once again in person. Hosterman said the biggest challenges the photographers faced were how to capture stories during a pandemic environment, especially with face mask and other restrictions. 

The Rotunda has functioned to provide an essential service to the Longwood community for over 100 years. But why should the Longwood community continue to read and/or support The Rotunda in our post-pandemic world? If you ask club advisor Halliday, he will say, “Without The Rotunda, there is no voice of the student. Period.” There is no “permanent representation of the student experience.” 

Halliday also stated that he felt that students who stay informed through the paper feel more “strongly in their connection to the university.” Halliday concluded by making the important point that The Rotunda and other news organizations hold a mirror to their communities and that “students need to experience it while they’re here in order to become more informed citizens when they leave.”

If you are interested in joining the team, there are plenty of positions to choose from, as listed above. The Rotunda is always looking for writers, photographers, videographers, editors, and more. Robinson and Thompson agreed that in order to join The Rotunda you don’t have to be good at anything, as long as you’re willing to learn, they will teach you everything you need to know. Meetings are hosted weekly in The Rotunda office, located in Upchurch across from Starbucks.