Opinion

From the desk of the editor in chief

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In a letter to Charles Yancey dated Jan. 6, 1816, Thomas Jefferson writes, "Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe."

In an era of decreasingly free and increasingly dependent student newspapers, The Badger Herald is proud to be one of the rare exceptions to the prevailing rule — a completely independent daily student publication, and the largest one in America, at that. Every voting member of both our Board of Directors and Editorial Board is a student at the University of Wisconsin, not a single dollar in our bank account comes in the form of a school-sponsored handout and every month we pay rent on our off-campus office.

It has long been the belief of The Badger Herald that the best way for students to follow the true goings-on of UW is to read about them in a newspaper that is in no way beholden to the school or people it covers — and, since September 1969, we have sought to embody that very philosophy in every aspect of our work.

The product we present five days a week is a fine balance of where students' interests have traditionally lain — in current events, the arts, athletics and matters of contention. We seek to bring you the day's headlines in an objective manner in our News section and through all the appropriate lenses of intellectual pontification on our Opinion page. Movies, music, food and culture find a home in our ArtsEtc. section; Big Ten athletics, Bucky Badger and even women's tennis are covered on our Sports page. And when an 8:30 Powerpoint presentation has turned monotonously dull, there is always the crossword puzzle and comics page for your amusement.

At the end of each day, our job is to publish the best product for you, our readership. And as New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger once said, "More than print and ink, a newspaper is a collection of fierce individualists who somehow manage to perform the astounding daily miracle of merging their own personalities under the discipline of the deadline and retain the flavor of their own minds in print."