By Josh Lister
March 26, 2025
If you are reading this then you already know that we have a new website. the team here is working hard to create a community resource that you can count on and would like to be a part of. We are starting several new initiatives and restarting or refreshing others. we are restarting podcasting and focusing on social media to help tell our community stories. Our goal is to provide news and entertainment that is useful to the community, and happening in our community. To put it simply, we are your community media outlet and our intention is to serve you, our community.
Some of our new features you will find are sections like the Community Corner under the Life &Culture section. This is a place where you get to submit your creative expressions for publication. We want to give an outlet for the community to share their visions through creative outlets. This could be photography, poetry, creative writing, painting, drawing, sculpting, or any other form of creative expression that you can come up with that can be shared over the internet. Check out the section and then share your expression with the world.
Another new section you will see is Nuestra Voz. This is Our Voice, a Hispanic culture and news section. We are writing news in Spanish that are not just English stories run through Google Translate. This is news and entertainment by and for the Hispanic community. This is a service we should obviously be offering with UHCL being an Hispanic-Serving Institution. If you have an idea for a story, or an event that could use coverage, please let us know. We will be glad to take a look at it.
We are engaging the community around the university as well. They are part of what makes UHCL a great place to be. We shop at local stores, eat in local restaurants, and socialize at local parks or other gathering spots(I’m not suggesting bars, but…), so they are part of the community. We want to talk about events happening around us, not just what is on campus.
I have been walking around and talking to folks on campus and I am asking what you want to know. Tell me what you want us to give you in your community media outlet. The number one request was a way to see what is happening on campus. There are so many emails telling about events or news, or Writing Center, or honor societies, and so much more, that we become desensitized to them and many people just skim through and ignore the majority of their emails. So while the university and student orgs host a lot of events for our community it is hard to find a single source of what is happening. We are putting together a new segment that asks, “What are you doing next week?” We are compiling events that will be coming up and helping to put a consolidated list out for your convenience. We understand the emails are overwhelming, we are students too, and Get Involved is a great resource but it is not without its flaws, like events not listed in chronological order. The Hawk Headlines are part of the Department of Student Affairs communication program and another great source of what the DSA has coming up. The UHCL Events Calendar has some good information about upcoming events, but it is populated by the host of the event who doesn’t always do it, leaving the calendar incomplete. Long story short, we want to help put out a consolidated list of upcoming events as well as offering coverage of the events for media content, such as the upcoming BFA Exhibition artist reception on March 27 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
We want to hear from you, the reader, to know what you want, or what you think. If you have an opinion about something, send us an email and you could end up in our Opinion section (if you don’t want to be published then just say so in your email). If you have a newsworthy item that you want to write up, we will gladly take reader summitted articles. Mostly, we want to know what’s on your mind. Tell us what you want, what you want us to do, and how we can best serve you. And please be patient, this is a new website which we will be making changes and adjustments to as we go.
Please reach out any time. We can be reached at [email protected], online using the Contact Us page. I look forward to hearing from you all.
Josh
