By Editorial Board
Here’s your first bit of news for the school year, courtesy of the Kaneland Krier: it’s time to give up hibernating for 13 hours a day, spending time on meaningless filler activities so you don’t get fused to the couch and flirting with those hotties at the pool. No more vacations, ice cream trucks or longing for something to do, because school has started, and you’ve got seven hours now where what you’re doing has already been decided for you.
Certainly, you already knew this, and possibly, you’re thinking, “Leave it to the Krier to tell us what we figured out a while ago.” Which is why we’ve taken this opportunity to refresh your memories on our ethics, rights, responsibilities, and, most importantly, our goals, which will continue to improve the quality of our wonderful newsmagazine, which strives to break the hot stories and give you the in-depth coverage.
As always, we will maintain a high standard of journalism, complete with honest reporting, important stories and full coverage of everything you want to know. We continue to make every effort possible to achieve accuracy and gain your trust as our readers, just as every staff before us has done. We function as an open student forum, which means we have Tinker rights. This means that we have the power to produce our paper without prior administrative review from anyone except our staff.
Our paper continues to be student-researched, student-reported, student-developed and student-published, so you’re getting a genuine paper run by students for students about things that concern students. As with every right, our Tinker rights come with responsibility. Any concerns or complaints fall directly on our shoulders, and not of those of Kaneland High School.
To keep ourselves in check, we maintain a strict code of ethics that we review, revise and improve every year. We also have new goals for the year, intending to further improve the quality of our paper. One important goal is to have better visuals; we’re going to try our best to get good action shots full of people so you aren’t staring at cartoons and photo illustrations. Another goal is to get every student in the Krier. Whether it’s on a sidebar, in a story, or in a picture, we want you somewhere in the Krier.
We also want to continue improving our stories, and with better stories comes more reader feedback. We want you to care about what we’re informing you of. We want you to send us letters and tell us what you think; a big goal for us is to know that you’re being informed enough to form your own opinions, and we want to hear what you have to say. We will also have better fact-checking methods. This is not only a goal for us; it’s something we’ve already begun to achieve.
We don’t want to misquote you or misinterpret something you said. Whatever you tell us, we want it in the Krier exactly the way you said it to our faces. Finally, our last goal is to increase our readership. No more Kriers in the garbage or in the recycling bin or on the floors. We’re actually hoping to increase our readership from about four people to a magical number in the hundreds.
The bottom line is that we want to continue to peak your interest, make you think about what you’re reading and discuss what you’ve read with your friends. We want to continue to produce the same high-quality paper we’ve been producing for years, but with a few tweaks to make it even better. In the event that you do find cause for concern or compliments, you can contact us in various ways.
Our e-mail, as posted on many a Krier page, is [email protected]. You can visit us in room B111 Thursdays during STEN for our weekly meetings.
And lastly, you could drop us a letter in our silver mailbox outside room B111. Feel free to give us feedback on a story. Make sure you include your name, because we don’t accept anonymous letters, and make sure it stays at 300 words or less, and we’ll do our best to incorporate your feedback into the Krier. The only reason we won’t is if it is obscene, libelous, disruptive or an invasion of privacy. Don’t fret about anybody catching a glimpse of it, because the only eyes who will see it before publication are those of our editorial board.