There are elements of journalism that the CU Independent staff will always pursue above all else — accuracy, relevancy, timeliness and objectivity — but looking toward Spring 2014, we’ve come to realize that we embody so much more than those fundamentals.

“We are not a paper.

We are an interactive media site dedicated to informing the CU and Boulder communities respectfully and accurately.

We are the future of student media.”

Our mission statement was written in 2012, when those sentences were goals we strived for. Now, more than one year later, we represent them fully and take pride in the work we’ve done to establish ourselves as a testing pad for new ways to connect to our audience and present information that is valuable to them.

It’s been an eventful semester for us. In the past few months, we launched a new website and were named one of the top student news sites in the nation through a Pacemaker Award nomination from the Associated Collegiate Press for our work from 2012-2013.

Spring 2014 will see us continue to improve. We are committed to producing quality content in the form of breaking news, long-form features, sports recaps, photo galleries and essays, music playlists, opinion columns, video pieces and aggregation of relevant news from the state and beyond, to name just a handful of what we will provide.

On behalf of the CUI team, I’d like to thank our audience, especially our fellow students at the University of Colorado Boulder, for being the springboard and inspiration behind all that we do. Though we go dark during the holidays, you can always contact us at tips@cuindependent.com for feedback and general comments, or reach out via our Twitter and Facebook.

See you in the new year,

Annie Melton, Editor-in-Chief

Contact CU Independent Editor-in-Chief Annie Melton (@meltonannie1) at anne.melton@colorado.edu.