In 2017, New Zealand pop singer Lorde released the second single off her anticipated second album, “Melodrama.” The song, “Perfect Places” ends in a line that goes, “What the fuck are perfect places anyway?”

This same year, the world spun on its axis. Donald Trump became president of the United States bringing in numerous changes that threatened civil rights, and the effects brought tragedy to people’s lives. Icons were lost such as Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell bringing attention to epidemics that were once lost in mainstream media.

Perfect places seemed far from the 2017 that we were living, and the news showed that.

This generation is a digital one. Most people get their news off their phones, in bite sized pieces from Twitter or even checking out someone’s SnapChat. Newspapers are dying slowly, and publications are pushing to make their publications more tech-based.

This is what happened to our publications here at Mt. SAC. After a partnership with Medium, our newsroom was given a partnership with Washington Post just last year. We’d abandoned print all together for a while by then, a huge feat since we are the first community college to do so. It felt nothing but awesome to wear “RIP Prints” shirts to the Journalism Association of Community Colleges Convention earning us both stares and praise.

So with this ever changing world and a shift toward tech journalism, our team had to figure how to tell stories, and tell them in a way people would give a damn about.

At first we built a publication called SAC Media on Medium, whose focus was to bring edgy and fun news to an audience that cared about news but also cared about how it was delivered. Guided by my mentor and the coolest millennial I’ve met, Talin Hakopyan, we garnered content toward an audience who both wanted to read about Trump’s wall policies but also figure which One Direction member matched their horoscope. We’d cracked through the code, but there was still a lot we didn’t know.

Simultaneously, our partnership with the Washington Post established SAC on Scene which focused on more traditional journalism. The two publications were opposites of each other, and yet were more similar than any of us imagined. Our audiences were both looking for the same thing: stories that would make them care. It was realizing this that my adviser, and basically the Yoda to all of us, Toni Albertson agreed we merge the sites together, with content you would find on the former SAC Media being on the tab you clicked on right now, POP.

So what exactly is POP? It’s a snapshot of this new era. It’s everything this generation craves whether it be the latest pop culture or what the hell is happening in the news told in a way that makes them give a shit. To answer Lorde’s question, no one really knows what a perfect place is, but POP is going to help you guide through it.

Without further ado, welcome to POP.