The 12th Player

The Temple community is this newspaper’s 12th man on the field. Though it is a trite sports reference, we just started football season. So bear with us.

Much like the overused football cliché, the 12th man, also known as the crowd, supports his home team in order to improve play and boost morale. The Temple News is publishing twice a week this year, doubling our work, and high morale is exactly what we need.

The Temple News plays to the home crowd every time it’s published. Though the newspaper covers city-wide issues and national affairs, Temple is still our main concern. After all, it’s the people in and around Temple who are actually reading. But in order to gain an advantage over the constant flow of newsworthy stories pertaining to the university, we are in dire need of an extra filter to improve the paper. That’s the job of the 12th man.

We urge readers to send article ideas to any of our editors. Let us know what you think is newsworthy, especially if we haven’t covered the subject in prior issues.

In the mayhem of maintaining our production schedule, we may overlook something, or we may just not look far enough. To quote The Washington Post, our staff does not want reading this newspaper to be like “tapping the stream of conciousness of some extraordinarily dull person at a funeral as they go on about flowers and the crowd and the tacky choice of coffin.”

We want to report the news and nothing else. We want to be reflective, insightful and balanced. Finally, we will make every effort to avoid the often-repeated mistake of giving precedence to stories that are “all appetite and no moral clarity.” But it won’t always happen. If so, call us out.

Send an e-mail to any editor or writer with comments on his or her story. E-mail addresses appear at the end of every printed article. If you want to have the entire Temple community hear the “real” story behind a story, send a letter to the editor. You can also stop by the office and tell us in person; we are located in the Student Center, room 243.

Admittedly, this year will be an arduous effort, and we’ll stumble over ourselves more than once. Though we may encounter more mistakes than we would care to, it is our vision to present journalistically sound articles and professional design to Temple students and staff.

As our motto proclaims, we have been a watchdog for the Temple community since 1921. We consider it our job, and we will be watching for stories continuously.

But in the never-ending quest for the best story, we may become lost in the news buzz and mired in office chaos. So in order to do the job effectively, we ask that our readers consider watching us.