At the heart of the pandemic, she created weekly briefings to maintain a sense of community at a time when everyone felt divided. Fast forward a year later and back in person, she pushed for the publication of the first edition of Raider Voice’s print magazine. These changes, however, were only a few of the ones spearheaded by Editor-in-Chief, Katie Lewis, in order to pursue her end goal of making the Raider Voice a student’s news source on campus.

Katie served a total of three years on the newspaper, and two as Editor-in-Chief. At the beginning of her second year and with COVID-19 having locked everyone in their homes, Katie had some significant challenges to tackle.

It was during this time that Katie established a regular production calendar, and weekly briefings to keep the student body connected. She also spent time developing our social media site. Her leadership and hard work encouraged her staff to meet deadlines and publish content our readers would enjoy. Our site has now amassed over 1800 publication subscribers, and over 1000 social media followers, across all platforms. 

She’s written award-winning articles, remodeled the site into one that led to national acclaim, and developed our podcast and social media outlets. Her contributions led to over 100 published articles and multimedia pieces across all of our digital mass media outlets, and countless awards for her individual work. 

But none of this really matters to Katie. Her end goal was not to receive acclaim for herself, but to improve all aspects of the site, especially our staff. She always had time to help every one of us on any of our pieces, and encouraged us all to submit our pieces for competition. She’s been our biggest cheerleader whenever any one of us earned a “Best of SNO” or national recognition for our work, and she established a “Staffer of the Month” award to build staff camaraderie.  

In fact, Katie graduated from the International Baccalaureate program two weeks ago and she has still been coming into class, making sure that the site will be left in good and ready hands. 

Katie will take her talents to Villanova University in the fall, where she plans to join the Villanova newspaper, already set to improve their publication with a list of suggested improvements.

“We have no doubt that she will continue to use her voice to effect change and champion a free press,” said The Raider Voice adviser Monica Rodriguez, when presenting Katie with the department’s senior award last week. 

Although our staff will undoubtedly feel her absence as we attempt to fill her shoes, we will take those words to heart as we continue to push our publication forward. So, thank you, Katie! Your kindness, enthusiasm and work ethic has made an impact on not only The Raider Voice news site, but on every one of us. We can’t wait to see what you’ll do next!