Letter from the Editor

After another very fast summer, we're all back on campus for another very fast year. For many of us, myself included, it's the last year we'll spend at Tufts, so there's a fair amount of pressure to make it count. For me, making the first half of my last year count will mean doing a good job at the head of the Tufts Daily -- and I'm excited to give that a shot.

This semester’s executive board is inheriting the Tufts Daily from a series of really strong editorships, whose leaders have solved tough problems, made critical improvements to the paper and generally left me with an incredibly solid platform to work from. In the past year we’ve had business teams that dug us out of a frightening financial hole, digital teams that built an intuitive and aesthetically pleasing website and editing teams that struck an excellent balance between responding constructively to criticism and defending bold reporting. As advances in our social media strategies have allowed us to be heard more widely, efforts such as our Inclusivity and Intentionality committee have given us the training and infrastructure to let us listen more carefully.

With all of the great work put into the Daily up until this point, we could just coast on the momentum built up by our predecessors and end up with a perfectly solid few months of journalism. However, the folks who comprise our staff are too full of great ideas to allow for that kind of complacency. Here are a few brief synopses of what we’ll be rolling out this semester:

Our Creative Director and Production Director – Shirley Wang and Andrew Stephens, respectively – have put together a stunning new design for the paper (which I’m sure you’ve already noticed if you’re reading this in print). The update gives our pages a refreshing air of professionalism that makes staring at the words for their form almost as pleasing as reading the words for their content. Check out what Andrew and Shirley have to say about this new development on page 11.

As we continue to adapt to the digital age, we’re working on integrating the online-only content on our blog, Jumbo Beat, with the Daily’s everyday operations. The brief, often lighthearted pieces that will appear on Jumbo Beat will continue to be fun complements to our regular coverage, and the polls and quizzes we’ll be publishing there should facilitate a more interactive relationship with all of our readers.

Since some of the stories we publish require more time and research than others, we’re going to work on putting together an investigative team to ensure our reporting has as much depth as it should. By looking beyond interview testimonials and toward a story’s underlying details and broader contexts, we hope to publish more complete and compelling pieces about some of the most important issues on campus.

In short, the Daily is a work in progress, and it’s progressing in a lot of exciting ways. I hope that these developments will be as interesting to all of you as they are to me, or at least interesting enough for you to stick around and keep reading. At best, they might be changes you feel you have a stake in. When we get it right, the Daily should be a place where the Tufts community comes to know itself, and all of the steps we’re taking should be in service of that familiarity. As always, you’re all encouraged to let us know when you think we could be approaching this goal more effectively through letters to the editor, email or even social media. As a start, keep an eye out for the feedback survey we’ll be posting online in the next few days.

Looking forward to a great semester on the Hill with you all.

See you in the funny papers,

Joe Palandrani

Editor-in-Chief