New year, new(s)paper

By Thresher Editorial Board     1/14/20 11:26pm

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.

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