On Fridays, you won’t see a printed Daily Illini newspaper on the stands, but you can still find our stories and photos on a redesigned website and our mobile site. And we’ve re-imagined how we approach design. Starting today, we have a much more minimalistic style, which places emphasis on the stories, the photos and everything in between.

We’re not cutting our coverage, though. Touchdown Times will be in Thursday’s publication, and our sister magazine, buzz, will be out Fridays. Technograph will hit the stands four times a year.

You won’t see any less content on our site than you have in the past, and there will be no reduction in the number of people, events or sports games that we cover. With these changes, we are bringing the content to where you want to see it — where you are — which is online and on social media. That starts with how we can tell stories.

Sixteen social media accounts across every department deliver our best, our most informative, our smartest, our most entertaining stories, photos, videos and broadcasts. Online, we’ve reorganized the site so that you can find our special sections in a single home and see more stories at a time, without all of the scrolling.

Last year, we adopted the science and engineering magazine Technograph, and this year we’ve brought the217.com community calendar under our wing. Soon, the calendar will be completely migrated to DailyIllini.com.  With these partnerships, we want to bring you more about what’s happening around you.  

We continue our efforts to grow, but doing that is expensive. Last year, the news broke that we owed $250,000 to our printer and other debtors. Since then we’ve paid it off, but we are still a media company fighting to stay alive.

In spring 2013 in an effort to cut our expenditures, we sold our Green Street building, consolidating a three-floor operation down to a single floor, which we now rent.  About a year before that, we turned to the students for support, and this semester we will receive it to help cover all of the media outlets at Illini Media Company. The $1.85-per-semester student fee is a reaffirmation of our mission: serving the University community as an editorially independent media organization.

This support means our readers have a greater stake in what we produce here. We want you to take a greater ownership of your Daily Illini, letting us know your questions, concerns and ideas as we progress through this media transition.

Over our 142-year history, we’ve made hundreds, if not thousands, of changes from small font tweaks to full-blown redesigns. Here is the next generation of The Daily Illini.