Those of you who rely on The Knox Student as your source to keep up with what’s happening at Knox will have noticed our lack of posts in previous weeks. You may have even had the unfortunate experience of trying to check our website only to be met with a blank WordPress page.
Almost a month ago now, our website went completely down — despite the best efforts of our Web Editor Ali Saadi and former Web Editor Michelle Dudley ‘21 to fix it, we were forced to declare the site dead and buried. As you can imagine, it’s a stressful experience to be in the middle of a term where we’d decided not to print a physical edition, and suddenly our primary publishing outlet was completely gone.
The exact cause of the website crash remains something of a mystery. Our technical advisors have attributed it to a malware attack that somehow made the website unrecoverable. We don’t know if this was essentially a random attack or someone intentionally targeting our site for infection. But whatever the cause, we know given how many important issues there are to report on this fall, we had to get back on our feet as soon as possible.
As you might be able to tell depending on where you’re reading this, we have been able to launch a new site, which involved a url move to theknoxstudent.org. It was no easy task getting a whole new website up without a moment’s notice, and we faced hurdles that made it take longer than we would have liked. But given the circumstances, we are very pleased to be able to launch a new website that is visually appealing and hopefully user-friendly. We plan to continue updating the website throughout the year to enhance certain features, but for now, we knew it was important to at least have a platform to publish on. Again, we thank our Web Editor Ali Saadi for all her help in this process.
It’s not perfect — for one, we have not yet been able to get our complete archive of articles from past years on the new site. Unfortunately, we still are facing technical challenges in making that happen, though it should happen eventually. But after some years of struggles with an old website that had become a mess to manage, it is a silver lining that this forced us to finally put together a new site that will hopefully make the jobs of future Editors-in-Chief easier.
That silver lining came with major downsides, of course. The website being down essentially cost us a month of reporting. We know that major events have transpired on campus in the past month, and our goal is always to provide prompt reporting on such events to keep the whole Knox community in the loop. We have to apologize for not being there to keep the school up to date in recent weeks.
Of course, the website being down is not the only problem we’ve been facing this term. TKS has still been dealing with and adjusting to the new campus environment created by COVID-19. We want to hold ourselves to as high a standard of regular reporting as we would in any normal year. We know factors like being limited to zoom meetings, not having a physical edition and the struggles everyone is dealing with in these challenging times means we’re not all at our best right now. At the end of the day, everyone on our staff faces the challenge of being a student and a reporter at the same time.
We do have to ask the campus to be patient with us as we continue trying to steer TKS back to normal standards. But we are aiming high — now that we’re back online, we’re able to share some stories our reporters have been working on this past month that we are proud of and believe do represent TKS at its best.
Earlier this fall TKS received a nomination for the Associated College Press’s Pacemaker Award, the most prestigious award for college newspapers in the country. We know that we can claim that type of honor because of the hard work of past Editors-in-Chief like last year’s Connor Wood ‘21. We want to continue living up to the legacy of those who passed the paper down to us.
This Editors’ Notebook was written by TKS’s Co-Editors-in-Chief, Carlos Flores-Gaytan and Sadie Cheney.
