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Thursday, Jan. 9
The Indiana Daily Student

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Another Friday column.\nWhat does that mean? It depends on who you ask. If you ask our publisher, Dave Adams, this column is a sigh of relief; the last public editor left under fire and a hail of uncooked eggs (well, not eggs, but close).\nIf you ask the average Indiana Daily Student reader, they might not even take notice of the words and ideas that fill this space (except you who are reading it, and for that you are beautiful!).\nIf you ask the IDS staff, the Friday column means that something went wrong, either with the world or with the newspaper, sometimes both.\nIf you ask our editor in chief, Josh Sanburn, the Friday column is the validation of an experiment gone right. From what I hear, this column is exactly what he envisioned it to be, despite the reservations (some founded, some not) that the staff had before this semester started.\nA grand experiment it was, and I hope it continues next semester under the new editor in chief. Aside from the small amount of personal fame it has afforded me ("hey, you're that guy in the paper, aren't you?"), this column has allowed me to take a step back from everything and look at it through new eyes. The news takes on an interesting face when you've got one foot in the paper and one foot in the real world. I see how it happens, how we react and what ends up on the page about it the next day. Then I get to see all the angry or happy letters that roll in from you, the viewing public.\nThen, after all that, I get to put in my two cents. \nHopefully for you all out there in real life, the word passed down from the mount every Friday gave you a little insight into the benevolent monster that is the IDS. Though I'm not a psychology major, this place makes for an interesting study of human reactions to stimulus in a closed system. After all of the cloistered humans write, edit and filter their reactions through the wringer of this closed system, they put it on paper and send it out for the world to see. This is why journalism is an importantly precarious balance, one that the world needs to thrive. To put it metaphorically, journalists have to stand on their tip-toes in the middle of a balance beam between personal bias and public interest. Newswriters are people too -- they have fears, hopes and hatreds. No other profession exposes itself as this one does. Every time a newspaper is published, it's like sticking your head out of a moving car's window and hoping something doesn't knock it off your shoulders. \nI'd like to think that 98 percent of the time we pull our heads back in unscathed.\nIn the hope of informing you readers about your world, we risk exposing our biases, revealing our faults and having pundits capitalize on our mistakes. It's a fair bet that if I stood out in front of Ballantine Hall and asked random people if they remember an IDS screw up, most of them would say yes. I'll also wager that if I asked those same people if they know whether their family doctor has ever been sued for malpractice, all of them would say they didn't know. \nHopefully that makes you think. As I've said, in the past. We might work here, but as the readers, this is as much your newspaper as ours. I hope you've learned as much as I have from this experiment in public editing.

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