By Kate Stockrahm

The Michigan Times is coming back.

The University of Michigan-Flint’s student newspaper, which covered the campus from 1959 until the end of the 2023-2024 academic year, is relaunching on January 14, 2026.

“I’m really excited,” Ramla Ouedraogo, the paper’s editor-in-chief, told East Village Magazine a little over a month after the publication’s quiet comeback announcement on Facebook.

Since that post, Ouedraogo – whose role includes managing the Michigan Times’ social media alongside writing, editing, and supporting hiring decisions – has had the paper’s four new staff writers introduce themselves via first names and short blurbs across the publication’s social accounts.

Egor, for example, said: “I’m here to make campus stories a little less boring and a lot more real – from small everyday wins to the big problems nobody wants to talk about.”

A still from a Facebook reel announcing the return of The Michigan Times on November 27, 2025.

There’s also Maxwell, who wants “to cover stories that matter” and “give the student body a voice”; Anij, who brings prior experience from research project writing; and Alyssa, who said her goal “is to take the stories and emotions we hear from our community and turn them into language that feels honest, warm, and real.”

For her part, Ouedraogo told EVM her immediate focus as editor is to get the Michigan Times back up and running for UM-Flint’s student body, which has felt left out of campus happenings in the absence of a student-led paper.

“A lot of people do miss it and do want it back,” the UM-Flint senior said. “They do want the independent information back.”

As for why the publication went away in the first place, Scott Atkinson, a former Flint Journal reporter and the Times’ faculty co-advisor alongside UM-Flint communications specialist Caroline Rathbun, said it was an unfortunate blend of circumstances.

“I hate the cliche, but it really was kind of a perfect storm,” Atkinson explained, citing the pandemic’s impact on all facets of campus activity combined with staffing transitions and a lack of journalistic course offerings that may otherwise spur student-writer participation.

“In short, we didn’t have anyone apply to be the editor-in-chief,” he said. “I feel like I have to drive that point home because there were a lot of people who kind of called ‘bullshit’ on that. But the truth was we had a couple of editors who were having a hard time just hiring writers.”

Eric Hinds, editor-in-chief during the publication’s sunset, seemingly confirmed as much in his own statement back in March 2024.

“Ever since I took over, I’ve been bailing water out of a sinking ship that never left the dock,” Hinds said. “There just didn’t seem to be any way to find people to work at the paper.”

At the time, Hinds was preparing to head off to law school in another state and had just one staff reporter, Grace Walker, who was transferring to Central Michigan University in the coming year.

But now, after serious discussions among the Michigan Times’ publication board, an encouraging trip to a college media conference, support from staff and a new chancellor with his own journalism background, and the return of a two-course offering in journalism essentials (taught by Atkinson under an “English and Communications” heading) this academic year, the Michigan Times seems poised for a solid return.

“There were a lot of good sessions and a lot of good ideas,” Atkinson said of the conference, recalling a presentation by a small school in Ohio that pushed him, Rathburn, and others to consider a different recruitment and training structure to meet students where they’re at this time around.

“[The session] really helped us wrap our heads around how we might approach it, not having a journalism program and being a smaller school,” Atkinson explained.

The school in question, Ohio Northern University (ONU), had opened up its paper’s staffing beyond English and Communications students, implemented a hybrid system of both staff and freelance writers to allow students to participate as their schedules allowed, and favored writers’ interests in its reporting beats, among other things.

While Atkinson noted the idea of solely catering to writers’ interests meant coverage would shift depending on who was on staff – a concession he “never wanted to make as an advisor” – he said the success of ONU’s paper is encouraging to him and the staff and students bringing the Michigan Times back to campus.

“It kind of opened our minds on how we might approach it structurally,” he said. “Instead of having a set number of staff writers, have it be more open to a larger group that can contribute based more on what they can.”

So far, the adjustments seem to be working.

Ouedraogo said the paper received somewhere around 20 applications for reporters in its initial job postings, and Atkinson, who is also a lecturer at UM-Flint, is hoping to continue to build on that momentum through his course series and the workshops he and Rathburn offer to Michigan Times writers.

While Atkinson admitted the career market for journalists is “dismal” right now, he said he hopes some of his students and the Times’ reporters will try pursue it, as skills you learn in journalism work are incredibly valuable, regardless.

“We live in a world where the trust in the media is at an all-time low, and I think it’s important for people to see how it actually works,” Atkinson said. “And I think beyond even that, the training you receive as a journalist teaches you a method of thinking that is very valuable and not often practiced… Journalism teaches you to accept difficult information, no matter who you are.”

Ouedraogo, an aspiring news and entertainment reporter herself, said it’s been quite a process to build the Michigan Times back up since she was hired in summer 2025. Even so, she confirmed that the new website will launch with at least six stories at the ready this month — with possible multimedia elements to come.

“‘I’m proud of them,” Ouedraogo, a self-proclaimed “not bubbly person,” said of her reporting team. “I am actually extremely proud of them and their work. I’m really excited for everyone else to see it on the 14th.”

The Michigan Times will re-launch at a new web address, mtimes.org, as its former domain was purchased by another entity in 2024.

Ouedraogo and Atkinson also confirmed they plan to return to print, too, sometime this semester.

Editor’s Note: This article originally ran in East Village Magazine’s January 2026 print edition.