On Aug. 24, 2006, USC’s student-run newspaper, The Gamecock, began printing five days a week. It rebranded, calling itself The Daily Gamecock.
A lot has changed over the last 20 years. While we aren’t printing daily anymore, we still cover the happenings at USC every day. Daily newspapers have been replaced with daily newsletters, and our online platforms have become a much larger part of what we do.
Monday, our redesigned website launches, along with a mobile app. We had a small team working over the summer to update our website, print a special sports-themed print edition, and work on getting our app ready to launch.
I spent a lot of time this summer looking through the archives and learning about the history of our paper and the changes it’s been through. The writing sections, page layouts, publishing schedules and design elements have changed under the countless different editors throughout the years.
When our sports editor, John Davis, and I decided to redesign the website, we looked through the archives, other newspaper’s sites and ideas our staff had for a redesign a few years ago. We made lists of features and fonts we knew we wanted to implement before getting to work on design.
We had help from our creative director, Megan Gourley, and managing editor, Simone Meyer, to put together a vision of how we wanted things to look. Simone and I, who have very little graphic design experience, designed several pages in Photoshop, which I have since been told made it a lot harder than it needed to be.
Our outreach director, Miles Shea, brought up the idea of an app for The Daily Gamecock in October 2025. He wanted to find innovative ways to engage with students and grow our audience. An app seemed like a good way to accomplish that.
The biggest reason we pushed to develop an app was to get news out to our audience as efficiently as possible. In a time when people get faster updates from social media, we’re adapting to get news for students by students out in the most timely manner we can.
While some of us didn't have much design experience, myself included, I’m really proud of what we put together. I feel so lucky to have been able to figure it out with my friends and have a product that will hopefully work to serve our audience in the best way we can.