Letter from the Editor

Welcome back to the Hill, Tufts! We hope all of you have had a restorative holiday and are ready for the semester ahead of us. I am so excited to spend my last semester at Tufts with the Daily, working alongside tireless and brilliant individuals, many of whom spent winter break working on projects and initiatives to move our paper forward.

In the way that only a print newspaper can truly feel, media as a whole is changing rapidly and unpredictably, pushing us at the Daily to continue to innovate and progress. We are excited to announce that we will be launching a mobile app for the Daily this spring. This means that our readers will soon be able to read the latest stories from the Daily on their phones, in addition to flipping through our beautiful print papers (Sudokus and jumbles are still there, don’t worry), receiving headlines in their email accounts and catching up with news directly from our website. Going mobile is just one of our initiatives to keep up with the times and utilize multimedia platforms to tell the stories of the Tufts community.

The Daily is a storied institution, and it is important for us, as reporters and editors carrying on its legacy, to recognize its history on this campus. We have been an independent paper of record chronicling the history at Tufts since 1980, and the place that we occupy in the community is one of great responsibility and power. With that in the mind, we are working to continuously prioritize fair and representative coverage by ensuring that the Daily truly reflects the Tufts community both internally and through our content. We acknowledge select experiences that the community has had with the Daily that have not reflected that and will continue to open up dialogue with different communities and organizations on campus and engage with feedback to maintain high standards of journalistic integrity. Additionally, we are continuing to actively recruit a diverse staff and editorial masthead to more reflectively and accurately tell the stories of every individual at Tufts. Part of this will be accomplished by a scholarship fund that we are working on establishing somewhere down the line in order to allow students who need a steady income during the semester to be able to invest their time with the Daily.

Each semester, increasingly passionate and talented individuals join our ranks to help tell the stories in and around the Tufts community. I am constantly in awe at the amount of time and energy that people on the Daily—from photographers to reporters to editors to staff members—invest to keep our paper not only running every day, but producing quality content. I’ve seen people put aside COMP0040 assignments and half-written essays to spend hours in the unventilated basement of Curtis Hall, agonizing over anything from the angle of a feature story to selecting the right photo to capture the latest sports game, from frantically calling sources for follow-up information and quotes to poring over stories for unwanted Oxford commas.

As journalists, we are often arbiters of the truth, deciding what we personally think is fair and balanced. As student journalists, this responsibility becomes unique in that we are sifting through the words and opinions of individuals in a community we inhabit: our friends and classmates, our professors and administrators. While we cannot promise to always tell stories in a way that you will fully agree with, we promise to always be listening to you as a part of the Tufts community to find the closest version to the objective truth. We want to hear your voice in op-eds, we want to see your comments on our articles and we want to be able to talk to you for our stories. When news breaks on campus, we promise to be there to tell you what is happening. We promise to tell you the stories everyone is talking about and the stories that no one is talking about. We promise to dig beneath the surface and past rhetoric to discover why things are the way they are and what the implications are for the members of our community. We promise to listen.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Editor in Chief

Sarah Zheng