Three Rhode Island School of Design juniors are planning to launch an online newspaper called the All-Nighter on Oct. 1. The paper will include school news, an opinions section and other components that will be discussed in the upcoming weeks.
"Our goal is to increase the dialogue that happens between students on campus, and make it more central," said Micah Barrett, one of the paper's editors. The editors — Rachel Hallock, Erica Morse and Barrett — said they hope to make the paper a true RISD creation by incorporating all areas of student life. For example, they are planning to create a section called "Inspiration," in which students will be able to upload their work to the website and receive comments from other students underneath, Morse said.
"One problem with RISD is that people don't communicate between different majors," Morse said. "I'm most excited about the collaboration opportunities (the paper) offers."
Morse added that the newspaper is a good way to communicate both with other students and with the administration. "Right now, everyone is excited about sharing in some way, but it's very scattered," she said, noting that various members of the school's faculty, including President John Maeda, have their own blogs. "This is one unified place where people can come to."
The idea for the All-Nighter came when the director of RISD's student life program approached Hallock last year, while she was working as an orientation leader, with the idea of having a website advertising the school's various events.
"Over time, we morphed the idea into a school newspaper, since we didn't have any regularly published school newspaper with actual news instead of creative writing," Hallock said.
The three editors are all studying graphic design at the design school, and while they don't have an extensive background in journalism, they have already recruited a large staff. At an activities fair on Benefit Street Sept. 14 — where the three wore "The All-Nighter Is All of Us" T-shirts and gleefully handed out packages of coffee, "Awake" tea and chocolate — their table had gathered the names of 80 interested students after only an hour.
Erica Ehrenbard, a RISD junior, said she would be interested in reading the paper since it would offer "a nice way to be aware of the world — not just RISD news, but the world through RISD's (eyes)."
Suzanne Geary, a sophomore at RISD, added that the newspaper would be helpful to "find out what's going on," she said. "Sometimes it's all a little disorganized."
The newspaper is currently being funded by the Office of Student Life, but the editors "are looking to find advertisements so we can become a little more independent from our school," Hallock said. But she added that the paper's budget is small since it will only be available online, a choice she said was made for a few reasons. "It'll save on production costs, it's more eco-friendly and we can update more frequently," she explained.
As for the paper's name, Hallock said it embodied the nature of RISD students. "It's kind of notorious (here) to have people pulling all-nighters all the time," she said. "We had some brainstorming sessions where we threw out names — someone said that one and we said, ‘That's perfect. That's so RISD.' "
