Dear readers,
What a year 2022 has been for The Augur Bit.
The new website, in its first year, experienced over 75 thousand page views, almost twice 2021’s online readership and over three times 2020’s—and not just because professional outlets relied on and cited the Bit’s work when GDS made national headlines. The newspaper is closing out 2022 with the last of eight print issues, more than in any recent year.
The Sports section began publishing a bulletin with GDS athletics results. The visuals department continued its rapid growth and created more photo stories than ever before. Reporters have delved into coverage of local politics. A cartoon strip by Julius Boxer-Cooper ’22 and Nava Mach’s illustration portfolio garnered recognition as among the best in the nation. An Alumni Advisory Board of seven journalists who went to GDS met for the first time. Boot camp, in its second incarnation, saw record participation.
The people responsible for the paper’s accomplishments are the members of its dedicated, dynamic and all-around marvelous staff: section editors who helped coordinate a newsletter each week, photographers who kept cameras ready, reporters who dropped everything to cover breaking news, a website manager (Thomas Ogada) who posted each and every bit of the Bit online, layout designers who pulled content into its most tangible form, writers who finished their first stories and others.
The collaboration and collective commitment that allow that team to produce what you have come to expect from the Bit—to fire on all cylinders so consistently—is remarkable to behold. To the staff: Thank you. And we’d be remiss not to mention our faculty advisor, Julia Fisher, who has spent untold hours helping us lead and edit the Bit and whose unwavering belief in the potential of student journalism inspires us.
To the Bit’s readers and sources: Thank you for buying into the promise of robust student journalism—that a school paper can be not only a vessel for students’ passions and a training ground for newspaper novices, but also a truly integral service to a community we love. We’ve been acutely aware of the unique possibilities and responsibility of being the only platform for student news reporting and opinion writing about GDS, driven by a mission of telling stories that enlighten (and delight!) readers, enrich the community and scrutinize the powers that be.
For us, stewarding the Bit for a year (or two) has been an honor and a joy. We are sad to be leaving our positions, but we leave tremendously excited about the Bit’s future. Recent progress only makes clear the newspaper’s capacity for more: in diversifying the staff so it better reflects the school it serves, publishing deeper, more ambitious reporting and promoting more free-flowing discourse in the Opinions section—generally, in making the Bit an unmissable destination for anyone who cares about understanding the GDS high school community.
We have the utmost confidence in our successors—Catherine Dooley, Caroline Garland and Laith Weinberger—and cannot wait to see where they and the staff soon to be assembled take The Augur Bit next.
Signing off,
Ethan, Andrew and Anna