Dear Readers,

School’s out, and internships are in.  With 40-hour workweeks and the requisite mental cleansing time, Port Side staffers are taking a bit of a break for the summer.  If one of us feels the compulsion to write a blog post, we will — but don’t expect anything until September.

In the meantime, here’s how we’re working to better serve you next year:

• We’re filling out our Campus Progress grant reapplication form for the fall 2010 semester.  As you may know, the Port Side receives a generous grant from the youth division of the Center for American Progress, which covers much of the hard copies’ printing costs.
• We’re looking into how we might attract donations from Claremont Colleges and Port Side alumni to help us out so that we can produce and distribute five or six, rather than four, print editions during the 2010-2011 academic year.  At this stage, if you’re interested in donating, please contact me at editor@claremontportside.com.
• We’re recruiting new staff writers, bloggers, copy editors, and illustrators for the upcoming school year, in order to increase the amount of content we can produce and to replace our beloved Class of 2010 graduates.  We will send out a call for applications later this summer, and any Claremont College student is encouraged to apply.
• We’re tweaking the design of the web site, so that our best-edited content — the print articles and archives — will be more easily accessible.  By better integrating the print articles and the blog posts on the site, we hope to make it much easier for you to navigate our menus and read our pieces.

Aside from those items, we’re handling a bunch of administrative and organizational stuff that will carry over to the fall semester and beyond.  After losing 3/6 of our Editorial Board to off-campus study programs, we’ve hired three new Managing Editors: Alex Heiney ‘12 (campus), Nick Rowe ‘13 (national), and Russell Page ‘13 (international).  With their help, we hope to produce more print editions with more localized angles and original reporting; break more campus stories with online exclusives; and more frequently update the blog with commentaries on current events and interesting online finds.

Stay tuned next year, and have a great summer!

Michelle