Sydney Martinez, Campus Carrier news editor
With the retirement of Student Publications Adviser Kevin Kleine at the end of this academic year, the Department of Communication is implementing changes to student media, including the end of the Campus Carrier’s weekly print edition and new leadership effective next year.
To replace Kleine’s advisement of Valkyrie lifestyle and culture magazine, Ramifications literary magazine and the Campus Carrier newspaper, two faculty members were asked to take charge. Steven Hames, adviser to Viking Fusion, will take on the role of Director of Student Media and adviser to the Campus Carrier. Chip McElroy, lecturer of graphic design, will be adviser to Valkyrie and Ramifications.
Department Chair of Communication Curt Hersey anticipated Berry administration asking about the future of the Carrier’s print edition, given the turn away from print media in today’s industry.
“It’s expensive,” Hersey said. “It is also time-consuming, and it is resource-intensive. We know that the number of students, and even faculty and staff, that pick up the physical Campus Carrier has decreased. The Campus Carrier is no different from every other newspaper in the nation in terms of readers and news. Consumers have shifted to digital consumption, as opposed to physical consumption.”
When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s (AJC) ended its print publication in December 2025, the department decided to make the Campus Carrier a fully online publication starting next year.
“The AJC announced that they were ceasing physical publication at the end of 2025 as we were talking about all these things,” Hersey said. “So, it made it that much more obvious that even the professional newspaper world is having a hard time sustaining physical publication. The AJC certainly is not the first to do that.”
Students will continue to design newspaper pages, but they will only be published online.
“The experiences that our students get of designing a newspaper, of writing a newspaper, of shooting for a newspaper, all of that is going to be retained, and we will still be doing a PDF weekly of the newspaper; that is the intention,” Hersey said.
There are plans underway for a combined URL between Fusion and Carrier where the website will lead to each media’s individual URLs. Each website will showcase their projects individually.
“How do we redesign [the website] and co-brand it as the Carrier-Fusion [website]?” Hames said. “We’re going to get [separate] URLs to redirect everything, and maybe we need to change the official [Viking Fusion] URL. Maybe we need to look at some umbrella term for the website where it is co-branded.”
According to Hersey, two communication faculty had the qualifications to take on Kleine’s responsibilities. Hames, adviser to Viking Fusion, was asked to take on an additional role as adviser to the Campus Carrier because of his prior experience in journalism.
“Carrier and Fusion have already been working closely together,” Hersey said. “Steven has a background in television journalism. He is very familiar with student media journalism and very tied into the larger national conversations, structures and organizations of advising on that kind of level. So, it made a lot of sense to ask Steven if he would be interested in that.”
In addition to his new advising position with the Carrier, Hames will be the Director of Student Media, overseeing the administrative matters and budgets of all four media outlets.
“The day-to-days, I will handle Fusion and Carrier,” Hames said. “McElroy will have the day-to-days of Valkyrie and Ram, but with my new role, I am going to oversee the LifeWorks aspect. So, approving time sheets, hires, all that kind of processing and then also looking at the budgets for all four organizations.”
Hames said he wants to see more collaboration between the Carrier and Fusion.
“What I would like to see is definitely some more collaboration than what has typically happened,” Hames said. “I want there to be more overall discussion with both groups of how we’re covering the news at Berry and Rome. I want us to really look at the multimedia aspects of it. How can we really implement those and, in some ways, cross-train both staffs?”
Hames said this collaboration will help students as they enter the media field.
“[Students have] got to know more media,” Hames said. “That makes them inherently more valuable to an employer because they’re not just ‘oh I can just write.’ Okay, well you can also go shoot some video and get some b-roll, you can also do an audio interview, you can work with Audition, you can work with Premiere, you can do all these things and put it together. Being able to do those things gives them more weapons, their arsenal for when they go out into the office.”
McElroy was excited and willing to advise Ramifications and Valkyrie.
“Chip is an accomplished designer with lots of experience outputting to print as well as digital,” Hersey said. “A lot of Ramifications and Valkyrie is design-oriented, and so he was the obvious choice to be an adviser for those organizations because of his professional experience. Having an adviser who’s very adept and familiar with graphic design and output made a lot of sense.”
McElroy said that he doesn’t expect to make major changes to the publications during his first year. He first wants to get to know the staffs and their production processes.
“My plan to begin with is to keep the structure the same,” McElroy said. “Creative people do have their own processes. So, even though [Kleine and I are] both designers, we kind of have our own style and our own processes. So, I think getting comfortable the student body with how I like to do things and kind of how I see things as a creative kind of problem solver will be kind of the beginning challenges.”
Currently, Valkyrie and Ramifications are printed out of Texas and shipped to Berry. McElroy said he wants to print locally so students can see the print process for themselves.
“I would really like to see the publications come back locally,” McElroy said. “So we can visit [the print] site. We can do press checks and we can do proofs of things, because I think that’s an important part of the process. Even as we push multimedia and start to learn other tools, I think it’s really important from a tactile experience to be able to see the thing, not just have it delivered in a box.”
The adviser transition will occur over the next few months, with the next advisers shadowing Kleine throughout the publication process. To begin the new school year, the advisers will officially take on their new roles on July 31.
“All of these decisions have been made with the idea of providing students a professional work environment that prepares them for their future and the media industry,” Hersey said.