By Vikram Bala ‘20 and Kira Lu ‘20, Editors-in-Chief

Welcome to the first issue by our new set of editors for the 2019-2020 school year! This year, we are looking to continue the newspaper’s tradition of excellence while also implementing several changes and additions that will allow The Minuteman to evolve with the community around us.

First, we would like to thank this past year’s Editors-in-Chief, Zach Burd, Sophie Gilbert, and Spencer Wang, for their impeccable leadership and Dr. Lankin and Sra. Ortega for their guidance and support. They made several great sets and innumerable community discussions possible through their hard work. In addition, we also want to thank all of the section editors and staff writers of this past year’s newspaper for their commitment to the newspaper. This past year has been one of the best yet, and we hope to continue the success of The Minuteman next year.

Aside from the print editions, the newspaper has been hidden away in the icons of the myNA dashboard, but next year we will be branching out through an Instagram page that will feature videos highlighting articles that you might miss out on otherwise. Through Instagram posts, we hope that we can reach more students and share articles that might not have made it to our popular print edition. On our Instagram we would also like to emphasize that The Minuteman is a newspaper for you, the NA community; Instagram stories will frequently be posted, asking students for improvements they would like to see and for feedback about previous publications.

One of our main focuses for the coming school year will be to continue developing The Minuteman’s role in the school community of generating dialogue about a variety of topics. Last year, the “Diversity Squared” and “Dialogue in a Culture of Controversy” set sparked much conversation among students and in classroom settings; we hope that the newspaper will continue to play a role of inspiring new ideas through articles centered around topics that outline the Newark Academy community. Furthermore, we are continuing the letter to the editor system established by last year’s editors-in-chief to encourage more engagement with the articles and the topics that they present.

One of the missions of The Minuteman is to bring together the community, whether it be through jokes made by the humor section, discussion facilitated by commentary articles, or even collaboration to solve the crossword, now crafted by Annika Inampudi ‘21 and Samantha Parelli ‘21. Even though as a school newspaper we cannot serve as a core news source, we hope to share a variety of student opinions and apply global news to Newark Academy.

As the new editors-in-chief, we strive to increase the role of the newspaper by broadening our horizons. It is our job as editors to ensure that we are highlighting lesser-known topics at NA while also displaying the bandwidth of the NA community’s reach outside of our small “bubble.” Such goals cannot be achieved without the vital contribution of our staff writers; if you are interested in sharing your voice with the school community by being on the front page of the newspaper, be sure to sign up at the club fair next fall. With that said, we both look forward to creating a new year of publications, and encourage everyone to submit their feedback about our end-of-year publication.