NEWS FLASH: WE’RE GOING ELECTRONIC

Many Pi Gamma Mu chapter sponsors have been vocal advocates of the Pi Gamma Mu Newsletter, testifying that it provides useful information to them and that it attracts positive attention from our student members. The writing and editing of the international newsletter are valuable services provided to the honor society by our executive director at the international office in Winfield, Kansas. The Board of Trustees is always gratified to read comments about how our sponsors and other members enjoy reading the newsletter.

As was customary for newspapers and newsletters, the Pi Gamma Mu Newsletter has been published on paper, with headlines and columns, in much the style of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. In recent years, the new technology of Adobe Acrobat has offered the possibility of freeing our newsletter from its reliance on paper, ink, and postal delivery so that it would be electronic and deliverable over the Internet. The style, however, would not change: There would still be headlines and columns, as have typified newspapers and newsletters since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1450. In surveys of chapter sponsors about whether they preferred a hardcopy newsletter or a softcopy newsletter, the sponsors proved to be, as a group, ambivalent some opposing abandonment of the paper version, some welcoming the Adobe-pdf alternative, and some pondering which would be more easily delivered to their chapters’ members.

The international office and the board now propose a more extensive change one that will not only end the use of paper, ink, and postal delivery but that will also bring about a redesign of the newsletter so that it looks more like the nytimes.com web page than the Times of the last half of the 19th century and of the 20th century. This redesign will make the newsletter available to many more people than we have been able to reach when paper copies have had to be distributed, the availability can be accomplished with both E mail and Pi Gamma Mu’s Web site, and the new design will be a design that our undergraduate students’ generation has come to find user-friendly and appealing. We are mailing out a hard copy of this newsletter to subscribers, and also sending it to email addresses we have been collecting. As of September, the Pi Gamma Mu Newsletter will be distributed via email only. Graduating seniors should check their email address since most colleges delete all students’ email addresses within a short time after graduation (from two weeks to six months). If you have received this newsletter by email, and are using a college email address, please follow the instructions at the bottom of the front page to update your email address as needed.

©2009 Pi Gamma Mu