SUNY Potsdam’s Newspaper is Back
The Racquette, SUNY Potsdam’s campus publication since 1927 is still going strong even with a few budgetary constraints. Since 2023, the publication has not been in normal newspaper print due to their former printing company closing down and funds being too tight to continue printing with another provider. To remedy this, The Racquette is now printing directly through SUNY Potsdam. This option has offered a cheaper alternative to continue running the paper, albeit while shrinking down the size and scope of the paper. Still, the paper is moving forward continuing this long-standing tradition on campus.
The current Editor-in-Chief of the paper, Lendhi Zamor, a senior at Potsdam who will be graduating in December. Zamor has been at The Racquette since January of 2022 starting as a staff writer and moving up to the role of Editor-in-Chief in February 2023 following their return to print following a brief stint of being online only. The Racquette has a steady flow of dedicated writers. They normally host a planning meeting as well every week at 4pm on the day of their layout with attendees numbering between 10 and 15 people. The Racquette publishes weekly and puts out a new edition every Thursday.
Another factor of the difficulties that they are facing is the fact that their editorial board is currently a majority seniors. That said, the editorial board has undergone an immense recruiting effort. They have conducted several different events, one of which was a fire pit/cookout. According to Zamor, The Racquette would collaborate with other clubs on campus to provide food and a larger community to all that would attend.
In addition to this, with the assistance of their faculty mentor in the English department they have also been able to pull writers from that as well. Recruitment efforts overall have been successful and while the outgoing editorial board will leave The Raquette in almost entirely new hands, the paper will still be in a position to stand for years and years to come.
The paper has been longer in past years but given constraints they have dropped it to the 8 pages as it stands today. They also have been printing in several different colors for each of their copies each week. Zamor noted that this is a cheaper alternative as opposed to printing on white paper. In addition to this, they also have branched out in the formation of new sections to their paper as well. For one, a new section that has replaced their sports section titled Satire and Minerva is a creative alternative to a section that the editorial board no longer see as necessary. This was due to the fact that most sports news on campus was covered by the SUNY Potsdam athletics department. The satire section is what it sounds like, while the Minerva section is essentially for advice. “We are doing an advice column, and I thought it would be cool if we had one that was not necessarily directly from the editorial board of the paper, but from a different entity” noted Zamor. Minerva is what they came up with as she is the Goddess of wisdom and she would be in their mind the perfect namesake of the advice section.
While Canton and Potsdam are just eleven miles apart, it often seems that we miss the goings on in Potsdam in covering news in Canton. That said, editors at both The Hill News and The Racquette have put together a plan to work together to better streamline and provide transparency in news across our two campuses. The plan is to establish an open line of communication between our two editorial boards passing news stories from SUNY Potsdam to SLU and vice versa. This way, readers at both campuses can be better informed about the neighboring campus so close but at the same time seeming so far from each other.
Maintaining lively campus newspapers is an important endeavor and working with each other to establish a steadfast connection is crucial to the continuation of each of the campus’s historic newspapers. And while The Hill News may be in a different position in the present than The Racquette, that does not diminish the fact that each of the campus publications have a storied history that deserves to continue on for years and years to come.