The Cavalier Daily
Serving the University Community Since 1890

Readers and rights

The 124th managing board pledges to serve its readership for the next calendar year

Journalism aims for a bird’s-eye view. At The Cavalier Daily, we have a view from below — more specifically, from Newcomb Hall’s basement. The basement is our battlefield: We fight spotty cell
service to call sources; frantically write, edit and lay out articles and other content; and sometimes wake up blinking on a couch, dry-mouthed and tousle-haired, not realizing we’d nodded off moments earlier.

Saturday morning our staff gathered in Jefferson Hall to elect editors to yearlong terms. With
new leadership comes new vision, and here’s ours: to preserve what’s best about our newspaper
while carrying it into a new digitally focused age of journalism.

Reporters — by observing events firsthand, speaking to a wide array of sources and conducting
original research — can achieve a faithful representation of events.

We may relish our amateur heroism and sleepless nights, but the view from the basement
accomplishes no end in itself. We plan to pepper our pages with a plurality of perspectives: to
interview diverse sets of sources and maintain The Cavalier Daily’s role as a forum for public
debate. Our attention to multiple viewpoints will help us provide the most complete coverage we
can.

None of what we do matters if we are not serving you. We have an obligation to keep
you informed and hold your leaders accountable. As we start this term, we approach this
responsibility with renewed enthusiasm.

We plan to revive our focus section to help investigate the issues that impact you — be it higher-
education bills in Richmond, decisions made by University administrators, actions taken by
student organizations or events in Charlottesville. Our goal is not just to inform but also to explain.

Our extensive coverage of the University’s leadership crisis last June taught us the value of a
strong online presence, and in the past months we’ve debuted a new website and expanded our
social-media offerings. We will continue to develop our online efforts, aided by a grant from the
University Parents Committee for better digital equipment. We also aim to offer more in-depth
multimedia reporting.

Readers are a prerequisite for our existence. Our hearts flutter when we see you pick up the
paper each morning, and we feverishly track your hits to our website. So we would like to offer
you a reader’s bill of rights. Here are some things you should expect from us during the next year:

We pledge to strive for factual accuracy and fairness in all our reporting.

In print and online, we guarantee clear, fresh writing and engaging visuals.

Our reporters will not be content with canned explanations or rote dismissals. They will ask hard
questions and cut through spin.

Our opinion pages will feature intelligent commentary from a variety of perspectives.

We will release a readership survey in March to gauge how we can continue to better serve you.
We will be responsive to your concerns about our coverage.

If we don’t meet these standards, let us know. Email us, call us or stop us on the Lawn. Better
yet, swing by our basement: We think you’ll enjoy the view.

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