Editor’s note: The Bruin is open to input from the UCLA community

To the Reader:

In the short time that I’ve been an editor for this paper, there has been one ringing criticism that I fear more than any other: We, as editors and writers cloistered here in the windowless rooms of Kerckhoff 118, have lost touch with what people on this campus care about.

And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

Earlier this summer, I had a conversation with Miles Solomon, the editor in chief of UCLA’s newest student newspaper, Koine. I asked him what the biggest challenge had been so far in starting up the new publication.

To my surprise, he didn’t say a word about ad revenue.

What he talked about, and what I had been thinking for the past month of my editorship, was essentially the same thing – that the hardest part of pursuing any journalistic enterprise is gauging what matters to your readership and fighting the constant fear that you’re never going to be able to do it right. Solomon talked to me about the difficulty of convincing writers that the topics they were covering mattered to people, and I thought about how many times I had run up against the same fear of readers’ apathy myself.

I’d like to begin the year, then, with a request: We here at the Daily Bruin do our best to cover the things you care about, but we can’t do it well without your help. All of you – undergraduate students, graduate students, staff and faculty, every part of the UCLA community – know what you care about better than we ever could. You, by the sheer number of eyes and ears and brains, will always catch things that we are going to miss. And we want you to tell us about those things.

The Opinion page is in many respects the place where you get to tell us most clearly what matters to you and what’s missing from the coverage you’re seeing in the Daily Bruin. At dailybruin.com/submit/, or in an email to [email protected], you can tell us in letters to the editor what we’re getting wrong or what we’re doing right with our opinion coverage. You can tell us in submissions about issues that we’ve failed to address at all. You can also just email us and tell us what you’re thinking, no pressure of publication involved. We want to know.

This page is a platform for members of the community to talk about what they find important. It works better when everyone is engaged and invested in using it. And it works best when we at the paper reach out to you to make sure you remember that we’re here.

So this is my first attempt at that: Hello! We’re here. We want you to have conversations with us and with one another.

I hope you’ll find our page a useful way to do that.

Warmly,

Natalie Delgadillo

Opinion editor