Beth­i­cal News Takes Hia­tus

MISHAWAKA--Beth­i­cal News, a snarky look at the events and hap­pen­ings at Bethel, be­gan in 2012 and ran un­til this school year. Orig­i­nally, ac­cord­ing to Julie Beam, dean of stu­dents and Shawn Holt­gren, vice pres­i­dent for stu­dent de­vel­op­ment, it was a stu­den­t’s idea for a satir­i­cal per­spec­tive about the things hap­pen­ing on cam­pus. The show would be pro­duced each week and would be shown in chapel every Fri­day as a way for laughs that the whole cam­pus could be in­volved in.

“In or­der for Beth­i­cal News to be ac­cu­rate and funny, it re­quires a sig­nif­i­cant time in­vest­ment from a num­ber of staff and stu­dents,” Beam said.

Due to mul­ti­ple con­flicts, in­clud­ing Covid-19, the viewer sta­tis­tics had been de­clin­ing, and Nathaniel Mon­tiel, who pre­vi­ously served as the RD of Oak­wood and as the di­rec­tor and writer for the show, took a new job, and no one was avail­able at the last minute to fill the po­si­tion. 

“If we learned that stu­dent in­ter­est is high in see­ing Beth­i­cal News re­turn, we’d love to look for ways it could be re­vived in the fu­ture in some form,” Beam said.

Holt­gren agreed, and said the dis­con­tin­u­a­tion is likely tem­po­rary.

“I would as­sume we may dis­cuss a pos­si­ble re-launch at some point in the com­ing year,” Holt­gren said.