Letter from the editors’ desk: Journalism is a community practice

By Kathleen Ortiz and Sarah Knowlton     8/26/25 9:11pm

First of all, we want to thank y’all for picking up the paper, reading our stories and answering our questions all the time. We want to inform students, staff and the community about what is happening at Rice, and the only way to do that is by hearing from you. Talk to us, email us, submit tips on our website, write an opinion piece; however you want to communicate, we always want to know what matters to you.

Creating mutual trust between the newspaper and the organizations and people it covers leads to more accurate and extensive reporting. We want to cover you well and having a relationship with you helps us do that to our best ability.

Although we both love journalism, that’s not enough to make a good editor-in-chief. We have this job because we, like you, care about what happens on campus. A lot of Rice life is student-run, including the Thresher — we’re independent from the university, and while we have a great adviser, the editorial decisions are ultimately made by us. 

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We believe that students can make a difference in the culture and community at Rice. We also think that students have both a right and a duty to be informed about the world around them. For us, that world is Rice. 

It’s a weird time for journalism. Public media is rapidly losing funding, and human-made and researched news is fighting against waves of AI-generated misinformation. To that end, we want to emphasize that we are constantly striving to know more and produce the highest quality paper possible every week. We don’t use ChatGPT in our newsroom — everything you read or see was created by your fellow students. While we may make mistakes, our goal is always to give you our best work.

We welcome you to email us if you see a mistake, a misspelling or something you disagree with. You can even publish responses to stories you disagree with through our letters to the editor policy.

Everyone is invited to join us in the work that we do, whether that is through writing a guest opinion or by becoming a staff member. A key piece of journalism is having diverse voices and diverse stories, which often come from having a wide variety of people in our offices reporting, editing and shooting photos.

We look forward to a great year!

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