It’s one thing to create a magazine in print. Take paper, ink, a press, an editor and a designer, writers and photographers, and content is created, printed and distributed.

It’s quite another to recreate that magazine in an online environment. For the past eight years, we’ve made various attempts to figure out just how (and sometimes even whether) Saint Michael’s College Magazine should appear online.

But in a world that increasingly sees Internet publishing as the other half of print publishing, I knew that it was time to reexamine what the magazine’s presence was online. I wanted to create something that would allow our readers to interact with the contents and have all the information that we print available online plus more in a format that is easy to use.

As anyone who blogs knows, blogging technology is now just about as easy to use as pen and paper, so earlier this summer, the Marketing and Communications department here at Saint Michael’s decided to take a look at a blog as a way of recreating the magazine online. It was relatively simple and, I have to admit, pretty fun to create this Web site. Now you can respond to online articles that you see in print and online; you can access Saint Michael’s Flickr and Facebook pages; and you can hopefully enjoy some Web content that isn’t in the magazine, such as the video of the teaching gardens.

Look around and let me know what you think. And if you have your own ideas for our site, I’d be happy to hear them. One of the best parts of the Internet is its possibilities for distance collaboration. I look forward to working with our readers to create the online magazine presence that reflects the magazine and its readers.

Caroline Crawford ccrawford@smcvt.edu