I love letters to the editor. It shows that people around us care about what we are writing. They read our product, consider what we say and either agree or disagree enough for them to take the time to write to us. It shows that the Lion is important to them; they are also important to us. We appreciate every letter.

Recently, we received a very insightful letter to the editor. The writer, who confessed that he or she was an avid fan of the Lion, wanted to voice some concerns about our publication. They said that Lion was mainly white, wrote stories chiefly concerning to white students and mostly interviewed the same group of friends when we needed a valuable student voice in a news story.

True.

You will notice, however, that the letter is not in our pages. It’s not because we disagree with it. The letter I’m talking about was not signed.

If you want your letter to be published, please sign it. It is unethical to publish anonymous letters. If the author wishes to resubmit it with a signature, we would be more than happy to publish it online. But, even if we can’t publish the letter, let’s address some of its concerns.

One issue the author saw in our paper was the lack of diversity on our staff. They suggested that we try to make sure that more different voices make it on staff. I do disagree with one small part of this idea. Diversity is most definitely a laudable goal, but Lion can’t easily recruit. All Lion staffers have taken the South Campus Journalistic Writing course, and have applied in the spring of their sophomore or junior year. It is not easy to recruit more diverse voices from the pool of applicants, but we should still encourage and hope for a more diverse staff by getting more people to take Journalistic Writing.

Another issue brought up is story content. We do try our hardest to publish stories that interest the entire LT student body, but too often we end up writing about things that interest us. People write about what they know, plain and simple. It’s especially easy when we already have a contact through staff, such as a person already on cheerleading. But we need to expand our horizons. Thank you for helping us look beyond the basics and see all the parts of LT.

A third issue is the people we interview. When writing a news story, if there is not a student explicitly included, we usually ask a student for his or her opinions on the topic. This is done to make sure that everyone can see what the average student thinks about news stories around school and the surrounding community. There is one big problem here. Many times, we end up interviewing someone from our own group of friends—sometimes the same person for different stories in different issues. This needs to stop.

I don’t agree, however, with the anonymous author’s plans. There is no feasible way to regulate each student individually, as was proposed in the unsigned letter. It’s just not practical to keep track of every single time we ask people for comment. Some people will be repeated, and for good reason. The Student Council President would have more to say than others, for example. The solution to this problem is mainly to keep in mind when writing that we are trying to represent the diversity of LT in the pages of the Lion.

We try to turn out a quality paper for LT, and I think we do. If you have a problem or issue with it, please write us.

But also, please sign it.