Collegiate Times

With a new year at the Collegiate Times comes a new way of getting things done. Of course, over the past 106 years, the mission has always been the same. We've been serving the Virginia Tech community since 1903.

This year, however, we raised this question: Have we adequately reflected all of the opinions of the Tech community for all of those years? Maybe we have, but this year we want to be even better at it.

Last year the CT received a lot of flak for dedicating too much coverage to some things and not enough to others. At the center of some of that conversation was the issue that came out right after Election Day. The CT staff decided to publish a photo of Tim Kaine, Mark Warner and Jim Webb with the headline "Hope Floats."

Although everyone knew that Barack Obama was historically elected the first African-American president, we still received criticism, and petitions from our readership about the lack of Obama coverage. Other sensitive issues, such as concealed carry, bring up a wide range of comments and feedback.

While that criticism didn't truly play a role in the reevaluation, we decided that we wanted to cover some things that maybe our staff isn't fully aware of.

That process started last year with extending invitations to student organizations on campus. We asked them to write columns for their newspaper.

With more than 600 student organizations on campus, and a lot of them housed in the same Squires Student Center as the CT offices, we held an open house before everyone got out of Blacksburg last summer.

We spoke with organizations and individuals alike about what topics meant the most to them. We wanted to give them an outlet to have these voices heard by a wide number of people.

And we hope this year we are going to succeed at this mission. In the second week of classes, we have already published two columns from student organizations. As public editor, I've attended meetings with several other student organizations that we've approached or have approached us. Hopefully this will allow more student orgs to open up to writing for the newspaper, because who doesn't like for his opinions to be heard?

Overall, newspapers are supposed to be unbiased, impartial and balanced reflections of everyday events. The news section will have a whole bunch of facts, but never an opinion. Features will have reviews of different entertainment pieces in addition to community and human interest stories. Sports will have recaps, previews and reports.

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