Middlebury student newspaper publishes its first-ever 'Green Issue'

Note: The Middlebury Campus, the student newspaper of Middlebury College, published its first-ever “Green Issue” on Nov. 20, 2008. The following is a press release issued by the editorial staff of The Campus.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Tess Russell
trussell@middlebury.edu
443.562.2201

Middlebury College student newspaper publishes first-ever green issue

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - Middlebury College’s weekly student newspaper, The Campus, released a special “green” issue on Nov. 20 to report on green issues affecting the campus and engage the community in environmental dialogue. According to Managing Editor Jack Lysohir, the newspaper’s staff believes this edition to be the first-ever issue of a college newspaper to break from its regular news cycle and cover solely environmental content.

“As a weekly newspaper at a very small college, we had the luxury of foregoing a full week of news, something that publications with greater readership can’t do,” said Lysohir.

Middlebury College has long been an institutional leader in the arena of environmental sustainability. Currently, the College - which captured the top spot on the Sierra Club magazine’s August 2008 “Schools That Get It” list - is building an $11 million biomass plant that will reduce the college’s oil consumption by 1 million gallons and help it move significantly towards its goal of carbon neutrality by 2016.

Special features of the green issue include:

• All content on environmental topics, including green submissions from regular columnists and articles on topics like organic food, environmental art and local trends in eco design
• Op-Eds solicited from environmental thinkers such as U.S. News and World Report’s Robert Schlesinger, author and Middlebury faculty member John Elder, and TOMS Shoes chief executive officer Blake Mycoskie
• Environmentally friendly production measures, including making all copy edits directly on computers instead of page proofs and distribution of the paper on foot

“We hope this will be an annual event,” said Lysohir. “Publishing a green issue allowed us to engage with environmental issues while implicitly exploring the contradictions inherent in ‘green’ publishing. As an editorial board, we think that the dialogue on environmental issues should play out like a good class - with discussion, dissent and respect for nuance. Because there is no obvious path for improving sustainability and ‘greening’ our lifestyles, we place a premium on conversation, and we hope that this green issue will help to inspire that very conversation.”

The Middlebury Campus is available online at http://www.middleburycampus.com.