Wapad gets new editor and goes digital

The Wapad campus newspaper has a new editor, and is going to be exclusively digital in 2021. Chelaine De Wet was appointed editor of the Wapad in early April, after the Wapad had been inactive since 12 March 2020. 

De Wet appointed her head editorial staff last week, and said that journalist applications will follow soon. Charonike Nel, student media coordinator at the NWU, said they had trouble appointing an editor at the end of the last term, due to Covid-19 and the lockdown restrictions. 

“It has been very difficult with regards to getting the student volunteers all in a row,” she said. “So, of course, no physical edition was published after lockdown started, and the idea is always to choose a new editor at the end of the year, but that was quite difficult with regards to the requirements according to Wapad’s rules and regulations,” she added. 

De Wet confirmed that the newspaper will be published online, and that they’re still looking at the format in which they are going to publish. “We want to make Wapad easily accessible, easy bite sized chunks of information so we are going to look at lots of different online formats and platforms,” she said.

While Wapad was working to overcome these struggles, first-years of 2021 were the first group to start the year without a Wapad in hand. Usually, the Wapad publishes the entire Registration and Orientation (R&O) programme for the first years, but this year students received it directly from the NWU online.

As a result, first-years are not as attached to the newspaper. Miles Kean Robinson, a second-year student studying BA Humanities with Psychology and Philosophy, said they would not go out of their way to look for it. “I’d open it in a new tab, and probably scroll through it when bored… or to see if they have written about anything I am involved in; but if I have to search for it myself I definitely would not read it.”