The Courier is reported, edited, designed and published entirely by College of DuPage students. The student editor-in-chief hires the Courier staff with an eye on reflecting the demographics of the college and having a diversity of thought and backgrounds. 

The first way we decide which stories to cover is by figuring out what’s of interest to, or on the minds of, the student reporting staff. The thinking here is if it’s interesting or useful to Courier students, there’s a good chance it may be interesting or useful to our readers because our primary audience is College of DuPage students.

The second way we decide what stories to cover is by asking you, the readers, what’s interesting or important to you. We solicit your feedback on all our stories (via reader comments, emails to the reporting staff and/or letters to the editor). We also send out reader feedback surveys at the end of each semester so you can tell us what you liked about our coverage and what we could do better. And, as always, we value story tips and suggestions at any time by sending an email to [email protected].

There is an inherent limitation to the number of stories we cover that stems from the size of the Courier staff. There are thousands of stories we could write about, but we only have limited staffing of up to a dozen Courier employees (at best) most semesters. If we can’t find a student interested in writing about a topic (such as sports or board of trustee meetings), that can limit or eliminate our coverage of that topic until we find someone willing to write about it. 

Finally, not all story ideas make it into the paper. 

The Courier hosts an all-staff meeting once a week (usually Monday or Tuesday afternoon) where the entire staff pitches story ideas and gets feedback from peers about the best ways to report and present their stories to our readers. Sometimes that process reveals that the idea needs more honing or that it isn’t a good story for our particular audience. The Courier’s adviser has more than 20 years of professional journalism experience and also attends the meeting to provide suggestions and input. The adviser is not a censor. Students have the final say on all content in the Courier, per state laws regarding student publications.