For our fourth editorial of the semester, we’re going to get a little more personal. If you find yourself holding the Trinitonian in your hands every Friday, or waking up to our newsletter in your inbox, it’s only fair that we get to know each other. The newsroom might be hidden away on campus, but our staff certainly is not.

My name is Logan, and although my byline isn’t attached to this section each week, these are my words. This editorial space is meant to share snippets of the staff’s thoughts, snippets that don’t make it out of our weekly Story Idea Meeting (SIM). This doesn’t mean we all agree on the editorial topics, but they remain reflective of the conversations we share as a staff and the ones students are having across campuses nationally.

I run the Trinitonian along with our incredibly diligent and talented Managing Editor, Alejandra Gerlach, as well as all the names listed on page 2. We have many roles as a student newspaper, but if we had to simplify it all, we are storytellers. For a moment, I want to tell our story.

It all starts on Thursday evenings when illustrators, writers, editors, photographers and more make their way to the newsroom. Most of us don’t even study communication (both Trinitonian executives are STEM majors), but all of us gather because we care about representing our Trinity community, holding it accountable and amplifying the voices that need to be heard. We circle up, knee-to-knee in the small room, and pitch our story ideas. Sometimes it lasts a clean hour, and sometimes we go back-and-forth on one topic alone for minutes on end.

After section editors assign stories and visual projects, there is a week of interviewing, shooting, illustrating and writing. Our digital team works on social media posts, newsletter templates and website design. Once everything is turned in, editors work closely with writers to make our content the best it can be before it’s all assembled on paper.

On Wednesday nights, you can find our editing team in the newsroom listening to music, drinking caffeinated beverages and huddling around computers together until well after midnight. This is our production night where we lay out all of the stories, visuals and advertisements for print. I can’t overstate the amount of dedication it takes from our staff to pull everything together in one night, just to come back to the newsroom the next day to start from the top.

Laura, our distribution manager, is single-handedly responsible for picking the thousand papers up from the printer on Thursday afternoons and delivering them to racks across campus. There is nothing better for us than to hold those pages in our hands and smell that fresh newspaper smell, so humor us when you pass a newsstand and pick a copy up for yourself.

All of this is to say: we work hard, and we are proud to be your campus newspaper. Journalism as a professional field is quite unstable at the moment — according to a Gallup poll released this year, citing Americans’ confidence in newspapers is at 16%, its lowest in the past three decades. As student journalists at a hyper-localized publication, we hope to maintain trust between our paper and the community it serves. We serve no corporate or political interest. In fact, we don’t even have prior review by Trinity’s administration. We are students first and foremost, committed to a student-run paper.

Because we are committed to this community, we want to hear from you. If you have any questions, comments or concerns about the Trinitonian and our coverage, don’t hesitate to email us at [email protected] or reach out to a staff member. You can write short letters to the editor or submit a longer guest column to be run in the newspaper and on our website. Maybe you have an idea for a story — send it our way.

To my staff: thank you for your hard work, and congratulations on your first four issues. I know we have looked forward to weekly printing for years now, and it is all because of you that we are back in action.

To our readers: thank you for being here and allowing us to be your campus voice. Here’s to a great year.