September was a weird month at The Uniter.

Staff turnover is to be expected year-to-year at a paper operated predominantly by students, but at the end of this past April we thought at least one-third of our personnel would be returning at the end of August.

Imagine our surprise when all of those people, save for one, found other jobs during the summer and moved on.

So, with no managing editor in place and 14 staffers getting accustomed to new jobs, September was an uncertain time.

We’re proud of all the issues we’ve published in the past seven weeks, but we know that our best ones are yet to come now that we’re fully-staffed and people have a better sense of what they’re doing.

But enough about us. At The Uniter, our focus is on you, the reader.

The Uniter is autonomous from the University of Winnipeg Students’ Association. We are published by Mouseland Press (MLP) Inc.

The purpose of MLP is to provide opportunities for students of the University of Winnipeg and the surrounding community to learn about and practice journalism, and to provide a forum for people to express, exchange and criticize ideas.

As a community-oriented organization, MLP strives to speak about, recognize, support and include in its content and organization the various communities not only of the University of Winnipeg, but also of Winnipeg’s downtown – an area defined in MLP’s bylaws as bounded by St. James Street in the west, Burrows Avenue in the north, the Red River in the east and Grant Avenue in the south.

We want to be relevant to our readers and cover the things you care about. We also want to offer coverage you can’t get anywhere else.

To that end, you may have noticed some changes we’ve made over the past few months.

Our listings used to be clumped together in a few pages near the back of the paper. Now, we’ve incorporated them into our campus news as well as arts and culture sections so that your options when it comes to volunteer opportunities, scholarship applications, rock shows, art exhibits and literary events are right in front of you.

We’ve also revamped our sports section. While it used to be at the back of the paper, we’ve moved Wesmen coverage into our campus news section and will feature health and lifestyle articles, as well as certain sports pieces, in our culture section.

The decision to eliminate the more traditional sports section was not an easy one to make. Still, we decided that it didn’t make sense for us to keep covering major league sports and worldwide sporting events like the Olympics.

In a world dominated by instant access to information, it doesn’t make sense for The Uniter, a weekly publication, to provide sports analysis – not when you can get it right after the game on TV or online (if not during the game itself).

The Uniter is still committed to covering the Wesmen as well as writing certain other sports articles. Look out for articles on boxing, fitness modeling and wrestling coming up in the near future.

And, as always, we’re committed to providing you with coverage of news, arts and culture from the downtown community, from a variety of view points.

Ultimately, we want our work to be a service to you.

So how are we doing? Does this ring true to your experience reading the paper?

Let us know. Send your feedback to [email protected], come visit us in room ORM14 in the Bulman mezzanine at the U of W or join the discussion online at www.uniter.ca.

We want to know what we’re doing right. Perhaps more importantly, though, we want to know what we’re doing wrong and where we’re falling short of our readers’ expectations.

Because ultimately, without you reading The Uniter, it wouldn’t exist at all.

Published in Volume 64, Number 7 of The Uniter (October 15, 2009)