Summer plans for the Daily Digest newsletter and COVID-19 Dashboard
The Office of Communication & Marketing will continue producing Daily Digest email newsletters this summer on a reduced, two-days-per-week schedule starting June 1, and will return to a five-day-a-week schedule beginning Aug. 16.
We will also modify our approach to reporting on COVID-19 cases in the campus community, suspending the daily narrative report on confirmed cases, and making the Coronavirus Dashboard the primary source for information about COVID-19 cases, tests, quarantine and isolation figures.
Read on for more details about these changes.
The Daily Digest will be published twice weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from June 1 – Aug. 12
The Daily Digest was designed to share consistent, timely campus news, while also helping to reduce overall email volume for us all.
Across campus, students and colleagues helped us achieve the latter goal, collaborating with our editorial team to include their messages in the Digest, instead of sending them as separate, mass emails (Reminder: Anyone can submit material for the Digest by emailing us at communication@newpaltz.edu).
As the newsletter pivots to a twice-weekly model during the (hopefully!) quieter summer months, we recognize there may be more cases when a time-sensitive message cannot wait to go out in the next issue.
We invite all offices, departments and individuals to use their discretion in sending emails to mass mailing lists (including facstaf-l), and continue collaborating with our team to include these messages in the Daily Digest when possible.
The daily narrative report on confirmed cases of COVID-19 will be suspended effective May 17
To date, every issue of the Daily Digest has led with a narrative report on new cases of COVID-19 among students, faculty and staff in our on-campus population.
As we transition to summer 2021, with significantly fewer people on campus and increasing rates of vaccination in our community, we anticipate a sharp decrease in the number of active cases that will need to be reported.
For that reason, we plan to pause our practice of including a narrative report in every issue, and merge the “Coronavirus Updates” and “News of the Day” sections of the newsletter into a single lead section, beginning on Monday, May 17.
COVID-19 information will still be shared with our community in the Coronavirus Dashboard
We will continue updating the Dashboard through the summer and including links to the Dashboard in every issue of the Daily Digest.
We may not update the Dashboard every day during summer, however. We will always update the Dashboard on any day when there are new COVID-19 cases in our campus community. If there are no new cases to report, we will update the Dashboard at least once per week, to report on on-campus COVID-19 testing.
Additionally, as we did after the fall 2020 semester, we will archive our total counts of COVID-19 cases in the campus community for spring 2021, and reset the Dashboard tallies to zero for summer 2021.
We are planning to bring the Daily Digest back Monday – Friday, beginning Aug. 16
While the Daily Digest was originally created as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen strong readership and positive feedback, both anecdotal and in a campuswide survey conducted in summer 2020.
The daily email newsletter has become a central component of the Office of Communication & Marketing’s effort to keep our community informed about institutional news and events (while also sharing some joyful photos!), and we intend to continue using it to serve this role as our campus emerges from the pandemic.
As always, we thank all students, faculty and staff who read the Daily Digest and have contributed important information, beautiful photos, creative works and event opportunities to this newsletter since it launched.