College of Arts and Sciences Moves to the A&S E-Zine to Get Out the News

The first issue of the UMKC CAS electronic newsletter was distributed in late October 2009 to all A&S faculty and staff. This new adventure into e-communications was born of both desire and necessity. The desire was to put a new look on the way we share information about the College. The necessity came from a backlog of information that had accumulated over the summer that could not be readily put on the A&S web site. The “Late Summer 2009 Issue” can be found at: http://cas.umkc.edu/News/CAS-News-Late-Summer-2009.pdf

Since this is a new enterprise in a rapidly changing environment, we expect that the look of our e-zine will continue to evolve for a while. We hope we can provide both timely and broad coverage of past and coming activities, of achievements and successes, and tell about the entire College family: staff, faculty, students, alumni as well as benefactors and friends of the College. While it may be necessary at times to focus more on one than another of these “family members,” over time we plan to showcase them all. And we want to do it by being a guide and not an essayist. That is, we plan to have little text and many links to fuller discussions and more details that should be found on department and other Web sites. We intend to have some photos and other graphics that help tell the stories we choose to cover. But our goal is to highlight topics in ways that catch the interest of readers of the E-Zine and point them to where they can find the rest of the story. We do not have the space to tell all that needs to be told about the many outstanding stories found in the College.

While we expect to publish in one-month intervals, special issues are always possible and the academic year calendar may cause us to vary our publication schedule at times. Those who have ideas or items for stories are asked to submit them by way of their chair, director or supervisor to Dale Neuman at Neumand@umkc.edu so that the items can first be posted to the unit’s Web site and we need only then provide a brief notice and the link in the A&S e-zine. We look forward to comments and suggestions.

-Written by Dale Neuman, Editor of the A&S Newsletter, Special Projects Associate, College of Arts and Sciences. He is also Director of the Harry S Truman Center for Governmental Affairs and Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science.