Editor’s Desk: Print is Forever

This week, The Phoenix published an online-only edition of our paper. This was an effort to save on printing costs. Given our allocated budget for the year, we are unable to print as frequently this year as we have in previous years. 

This is a trend in student newspapers across the nation. 

Naturally, this provides me the perfect opportunity to reflect on the importance of print media. In 2023, The Phoenix’s website crashed, and we lost every article we had ever published to our online platform, dating all the way back to 2013. We were never able to recover those articles. 

But our saving grace during the stressful time of my first year of college was print. We have been printing a weekly newspaper consistently since 1969 when we were founded, and all of those editions remain in the archives we have in the newsroom. It was thanks to those that we were able to cite our own previous reporting. 

It’s funny to think that if the website crashed five years from now, this week in Loyola’s history would almost vanish into thin air. 

If this happened, the Loyola class of 2040 would never know about the impacts of SNAP benefits during the government shutdown of 2025, which you can read about in news. They would never hear the retelling of the start of the first basketball season without Sister Jean’s presence on the sidelines — which you can read about in sports. They would be oblivious to the review in the arts section of the long-awaited Of Monsters and Men Album. And they certainly would never be aware of the trend towards being non-chalant, which is covered in opinion this week. 

Don’t be like the class of 2040. Read this week’s edition of The Phoenix, even if it is online-only. And if you are truly a big fan, consider donating to our printing endeavours here.