During Summer 2020, Colorado State University’s magazine team published a series of three special issues that combined and co-branded the institution’s premier print publications: STATE, the magazine of the CSU System, and Colorado State Magazine, the alumni publication for our flagship campus. The special issues reached an audience of about 120,000 engaged readers to highlight CSU System and campus responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the aim of demonstrating the vital importance of our academic mission during a global health and economic crisis.
Content in these special issues was designed to compellingly convey the immediate relevance of our teaching, research, and public engagement. As the pandemic hit the United States in March, our magazine team sought an unexpected story subject that would emphasize the university’s long-standing expertise in infectious disease research–the most urgent topic at hand–and the significance of its findings for our community, state, nation, and world. What better than the study of viruses in bats? The subject just happens to be at the center of the pandemic’s scientific mysteries, reflects Colorado State’s eminent disease research, and holds potential to illuminate infectious disease treatment and prevention now and into the future. Plus, the world’s only flying mammals are just plain fascinating. This strategizing led to the main research feature and its companion story in the first of our special STATE magazine issues focused on COVID-19. The lead story is headlined “Inside the Bat Cave”; its companion is “Germ Theory.
