Endings are always bittersweet. With summer vacation close enough to taste, today is a day to balance our excitement over finishing the year with our sadness at the prospect of leaving our fellow Jumbos for four months - and for some of us, at the reality of leaving Tufts' comfortable bubble for good.
At the Daily, we find ourselves torn between celebration and nostalgia as well. Today marks our 63rd and final edition of the semester. As editors, it is the happy and much-anticipated day when we will get our lives back after a semester of nearly sleepless nights spent in the windowless basement of Curtis Hall. But as we prepare to pass the torch on to the next group of victims - er, we mean editors - we will also miss spending each day with the wonderful, hardworking members of our staff.
The 2007-08 school year represents a similar duality for Tufts as a whole. Since September, the university has seen its share of major improvements, including a new campus social space at Hotung Café, several major steps forward in Tufts' quest for a need-blind admission process and the largest donation to Tufts in its 156-year history. But the same year also brought increased safety concerns near campus, the suspension of yet another Greek house and the high-profile scandal surrounding former Director of Student Activities Jodie Nealley's alleged embezzlement of $300,000 from the university.
As Tufts' newspaper of record, the Daily set out, amid these ongoing important stories, to break down barriers in the way we deliver the news. Behind a newly written ethics policy that has given us an unprecedented level of transparency, we pushed for more timely, thorough, substantive and engaging coverage. We took aesthetic risks in pursuit of a crisper and more visually interesting look, and we enriched our coverage with online-only content and interactive features on TuftsDaily.com.
At the beginning of the semester, I invited you, our readers, to help us fulfill our responsibility as reporters by sending us your opinions, reacting to our coverage through letters and online comments - and by criticizing us whenever we failed.
Four months, 900 pages and almost one million printed words later, we cannot thank you enough. It has been an honor to serve the Tufts community this semester, and as we cede our journalistic authority and responsibility to others, we cannot help but feel a sense of loss. We will miss this job.
But with the bittersweet taste of the end in our mouths, we are proud to leave our successors with a newspaper poised to excel. Under the thoughtful care of others, expect to see improved coverage, a fresher look and a more technologically integrated news product as the Tufts Daily continues to serve you in the years to come.
Matthew J. Skibinski
Editor-in-Chief
