According to the editorial team – who came up with the name themselves – the new identity shows what the organization is about. Editor-in-chief Maaike Platvoet: ‘The name has a certain freshness and urgency to it. ‘Today’ refers to the daily topicality. It’s our job to report on the news of the day. The ‘U’ refers to you, the reader. Our coverage is aimed at you as a student or university employee, and is often also about you. We cover everything that happens on and around the campus, and we closely follow developments on education, research, science and student life. All these things come together in our new name.’
International Community
One reason for the identity change is the editorial team’s wish to better serve the large population of international students and university employees. ‘The number of foreign students and employees will increase over the next couple of years’, says Platvoet. ‘As a news organization that aims to reach the whole UT community, we need to take that development into consideration. With our new name we hope we’ll be more attractive to this growing international readership.’
The name change is not the only way U-Today will try to better serve international readers. ‘We will publish more articles in English’, Platvoet explains. ‘Both English and Dutch articles will be published on a new homepage, which we will reveal later this year.’
Independence
The new identity will also solidify the independent character of the news organization. ‘For people outside the UT community it is not always clear that we are independent from the university’, says Platvoet. ‘By changing our name from UT Nieuws to U-Today, we hope to make it evident that we are an autonomous news platform that makes its own critical choices.’
