Dear Reader,

I am so excited to share The Bates Student’s first newsletter of the year with you! I started writing for The Student when I was a first year, and though for the first two years I was on staff I definitely did not imagine I’d be in this role, I am so glad to have an opportunity to lead this newspaper through its 150th year of publication. 

At the beginning of the summer, we created our inaugural alumni board, featuring reporters of all ages and experience levels who we believe will help guide us through this coming year. Our board includes journalists who work at The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, Politico, ABC News, The Kansas City Star, and NBC Sports Philadelphia. I believe that this board will help us shape the larger investigative stories we plan to publish this year and I feel incredibly honored that they have all agreed to return to their college newspaper to help its current staff and editors.

Later this summer, we published a special Roe v. Wade issue online, documenting The Student’s coverage of abortion through the last six decades, and hope that this special issue can serve as a resource to those looking to learn about how the issue has been prevelant at Bates. We also revamped our website and published our third annual orientation issue to help first year students adjust to life at Bates.

As I began thinking about this coming year, I continuously came back to the significance of journalism both on campus and in our greater world. Freedom of the press is an important principle of our democracy, and though we may just be a college newspaper, I believe that this principle is necessary for the functioning of our campus. We have both the privilege and the hefty responsibility of documenting what occurs at Bates, and our stories have been archived (and are available online!) since The Student’s founding in 1873. Sometimes the news is exciting and positive and sometimes it is messy. As student journalists, it is our job to report both and to report what happens fairly and accurately.

While I always encourage feedback, I wish to remind the Bates community that all of our writers and editors are learning as they go. We do not have a journalism major at Bates, and the reporters we have take on the added responsibility of writing for The Student because of the passion they have for the craft of journalism. We are not professionals, and getting hateful messages from your peers and then immediately seeing them afterwards in class or Commons is not fun. I like to think that freedom of the press also means freedom from harassment and bullying about your work.

I encourage you to send us story ideas and tips, which we anonymously accept on our website and to send us feedback to our email: [email protected]. I look forward to covering all news, both the positive and the negative, and hope that in our 150th year we can continue to produce coverage that is both fair and accurate and helps inform our campus community.

Sincerely,

Ellie Wolfe, Editor in Chief