New year, new(s)paper
In the spirit of the new year, we as the Thresher’s editorial board have set a few resolutions and invite y’all as the readers to hold us accountable. Going forward, we want to be more transparent about our operations as well as maintaining the standards and policies we’ve created this year in the spirit of transparency.
Through our recent readership survey, many respondents raised questions about how our opinions section operates. Recognizing it as an area for improvement, we recently created an official opinion policy to help future writers and provide clear guidelines. The Thresher editorial board (marked on our masthead) write each week, but all other opinions published do not reflect the Thresher’s perspective. As stated in our policy, we do not reject opinion pieces, other than those that contain hate speech or represent a conflict of interest. While we always aim to further improvement, we hope that creating clear, explicit policies has helped us cover some ground.
Some conversations, like whether we should capitalize races, are ongoing. Currently, we capitalize all races (i.e. Black and White) in accordance to the Diversity Style Guide and at odds with the Associated Press Style Guide (widely used in journalism). We recognize that the backgrounds of our staff make us less equipped to answer questions like these and report on less-represented groups on campus. In the next decade, we will strive to hire more diverse staff, bring these conversations to our audience and solicit feedback where we might be lacking. As always, we aspire to hold ourselves accountable to our readers and be as transparent as possible.
More from The Rice Thresher
Do more to make campus bird-friendly
April is the month of many things: Beer Bike, a solar eclipse, the last day of classes and, perhaps lesser known, Earth Month. As Rice launches a series of Earth Month events, I would like to address our potential as a campus community to be more environmentally conscious, particularly in an effort to make this campus more friendly to birds.
Take time for yourself during the summer
The academic year’s close means this issue will be our last until the fall semester, which gave us some time to reflect on what our editorial for our last issue should look like.
Student activism is working – and fear-mongering cannot hold us back
S.RES 02, titled “Student Association Boycott and Divestment from Corporations Complicit in the Ongoing Genocide in Gaza,” was presented to the Student Association on March 25. This resolution proposes the creation of an Ethical Spending Advisory Board designed to ensure that Blanket Tax funds are not dedicated to corporations that are complicit in Israeli colonial violence and apartheid based on guidelines created by the BDS movement.
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