By Chaz Muth
Trinity Newsroom Director

The beginning of 2023 offers the community of Trinity Washington University the dawn of a new era with the launching of the digital news site Trinity Times, the first time the school has had a student publication in nearly 13 years.

Though the new Trinity Times will have the capabilities of delivering content meant for a 21^st century audience – in the digital form of text, photography, video and podcasting – the mission will be similar to its predecessor, The Trinity Times student newspaper, which ran uninterrupted for 84 years, from 1926 to 2010.

That mission is to offer information important to the Trinity Washington University public, produced by the students and uncensored by the school’s leaders, all while offering budding student journalists a publishing venue as they learn their craft.

While the new Trinity multimedia newsroom will be a central lab for the journalism and communications programs at the university, Trinity Times staff will not be limited to students majoring in those disciplines.

The campus news outlet is open to any student who has a desire to produce content for the digital publication, whether it’s breaking news, cultural features, or opinion.

As I was going through the interview process in the middle of 2022 for my job as the university’s newsroom director, Trinity’s current president, Patricia McGuire, told me the absence of a student publication since 2010 felt awkward to her and she was eager to bring the Trinity Times back.

So, it was my mission after accepting the job to do just that, help facilitate the relaunching of the student publication, this time with all the bells and whistles available to us to reach today’s audience.

That journey began a year before I started my job last August, as several university staff and faculty members drafted a vision for a new multimedia newsroom and applied for a grant from the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation to fund it.

That grant was awarded in early 2022 and the university had the funds to begin building the multimedia newsroom wing in the Main Building in a space formerly occupied by the university’s founding religious community – the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur – and supplying it with the computers, camera gear, audio equipment and studio apparatus, the tools student journalists will need to tell the stories important to the Trinity community.

While the journey getting here has seemed long and arduous, we’ve been met with an eager student body ready to tackle the issues of the day.

The new student staff will develop organically during 2023 and the offerings will require our journalists to really listen to the Trinity public to acquire a keen understanding of the university’s interests.

The tenets of good journalism will always be at the forefront of the mission.

Number one among those canons of good journalism is to always tell the truth.

—

Chaz Muth has worked as a journalist for decades and was most recently the multimedia editor for Catholic News Service. He currently teaches journalism at Trinity and is the university’s newsroom director.