As a student newspaper, produced and operated entirely by students for 125 years, we at The Oracle are pretty proud of our publication. We also understand that the fact that we’re a bunch of students writing and publishing news is scary for some members of the Hamline community. As a result, many people don’t trust us. Of course, journalists are not among the most trusted members of society at large, but we as non-professionals are given even less faith.

Above all, the Hamline community deserves transparency from Hamline’s administration, staff and faculty. Many of the topics we seek to report on aren’t even controversial or difficult; they’re simply little-known and our goal is to inform students about changes on campus. Many of these stories we can only publish if sources are willing. However, there are numerous stories we we find worthy of covering where the topic should be public knowledge, but has not yet been adequately publicized. In those cases, there’s no excuse for sources being unwilling to talk to us or for putting off contacting us until it’s too late, because we’re not considered by some as a legitimate news outlet or campus group. A university should be for its students and so should its student newspaper, especially an independent one like ours. We do our best to serve and respect the Hamline community, and we expect the same in return.

We admit that sometimes there are mistakes in our paper. In fact, every single issue is likely to have typos, misspellings, confusing wordings and possibly an incorrect fact. We regret all of these errors. But they do not occur for lack of effort. Every story is read and reviewed by at least three copy editors, the copy chief, managing editor and editor in chief before being placed on the page, where it is again read by all of these people and edited before being sent to the printer. Still, things slip through, but that’s nothing new for newspapers at any level. And, yes, we admit, we’re students, and we’re constantly learning new things and doing our best to improve at reporting fairly and writing clearly.

Incorrect or confused facts are the absolute last thing we ever hope to publish. However, journalism presents a unique difficulty: it is entirely based on facts. In all areas of the paper except the Opinion section, every single piece is constructed basically of a string of facts, as accurate as we can possibly know, strung together in a readable fashion. Everything must either come from a reputable published source or a relevant human.

In this way, we hope to publish things that matter for students as well as faculty, staff and administrators on campus. One might not always be made aware of the news by The Oracle (let’s face it, as a weekly print newspaper on a tiny campus, little of what we’re able to cover is breaking news), but we feel that every story can inform every person on a least some facet of a topic, and can foster a greater understanding of Hamline events, policies, and controversies. Unfortunately, that worthy goal is often made unnecessarily difficult, because we can’t always acquire the facts to construct a legitimate and truthful story. Often representatives do not respond to our requests for interviews, continue to postpone responding to us or setting up an interview time, or tell us that we’re covering a story too soon–which is frustrating on our end because covering news as it’s happening is our job. In those cases, stories aren’t as complete and excellent as they could have been or we’re forced to postpone or cancel pieces altogether.

Basically, the message we’re trying to get across is this: we’re not that scary (we’re not Rita Skeeter), we’re not out to get you and our only mission is to tell stories solidly built on facts provided to us by as great of a variety of sources as possible, and be a reliable source of information for the Hamline community.

The last thing we want is to be misinterpreted as being out to get people; if we want to write a story on a topic, many people assume that we are out to find something negative. It’s true that many of the most important stories are about difficult and controversial topics, but this is true of news coverage at any level or jurisdiction. Occasionally we’re kept from telling stories because the sources we look to are afraid to talk to us due to past mistakes or misunderstandings. This is very unfortunate, especially because The Oracle’s staff changes drastically from year to year and because we feel the occasional accidental errors aren’t justification for being blacklisted. Even worse, secondhand sources gives us incorrect information which creates even more unwanted confusion.

To any who spot errors, we not only accept but welcome feedback and story ideas, and we will always run a list of corrections to factual errors or interpretive missteps. To submit corrections or simply provide feedback, please email us at thehamlineoracle@gmail.com.