Loquitur brings new staff, new attitude to the school year

SHAWN RICE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF SMR723@CABRINI EDU

One question echoed throughout the seminars at the MSCNE conference in Georgia, a weeklong conference in which editors from 50 different schools participated in, that needed to be answered. What are your goals for your school’s newspaper?

Easy enough question, sure, but not when you sit and really think about it. Finally, with an epiphany that would surpass all others known to mankind, the answer was found. The new staff of the Loquitur will run a newspaper whose goal is to report the truth, whether favorable or not, to the Cabrini community.

Besides the media’s ability to over hype potential news stories, they are allowing themselves to be labeled as a certain group by their choice of headline news. Basically, the media is being thrown into two categories: conservative and liberal news.

The Loquitur does not dispute their intentions to report unbiased news. The problem lies in the fact that most of their profit comes from sales or viewership, the media can’be faulted in reporting the news that makes them the most income.

In a way you can blame both the media and its audience because the media is only trying to please its audience in order to gain better ratings or more copies sold. How do you avoid outside influences in reporting? This is not an easy undertaking but one in which the Loquitur intends to do its best to accomplish.

By no means is the Loquitur a perfect paper but one promise that we will make is to report the truth. Especially, in a year that will see a presidential election, it is the role of the news media to represent the truth not party affiliation.

The Loquitur’s slogan “You Speak, We Listen” is true to a certain degree. In some cases the truth is not what everyone always desires to hear. If we were to listen and stop ourselves from going with a controversial story, we would be letting ourselves down and you, the readers.

How can the Loquitur strive to be an unbiased source of information? Simple, reach out to the community and rediscover the campus.

The Loquitur does not want to appear as if we are pushing a specific agenda into the readers’ faces. The campus consists of students with diverse ethnic backgrounds and differing views and it is our job to give a fair and balanced source of information to include all our students. Certainly, we will continue to have our detractors but unfortunately it is nearly impossible to satisfy everyone.

Now that you know the Loquitur ’s agenda, we need to explain the changes made to the paper. Besides altering the layout design of the paper, the online edition will feature more frequently, video pieces accompanying articles. This year the Loquitur expands itself by working along with a video staff who shoot and edit video packages for the Loquitur’s website.

The idea is not to overwhelm you, our readers; instead it is to provide more ways of presenting information for you. Video will give the Loquitur the ability to show some stories that would lose significance in print.

The beginning of the school presents a challenge to all students and we here at the Loquitur welcome the new, exciting year. The goal is simple: report the truth. That is our aim and yours is to absorb the information and make an educated decision based on facts.