A thank you to readers

When I made my final speech to the Indiana Daily Student staff on Friday, after four and a half years of working for this newspaper, I said I would have never survived being editor in chief without them -- my editors, designers and writers.\nI wanted to write this to say the same thing to you, the readers.\nFor the past 15 weeks, I've had the privilege to head one of the largest and most honored organizations on campus, and my goal this semester has been not only to continue the IDS' long-standing tradition as being one of the nation's best college newspapers, but to report the news in ways that made it matter and understandable to you.\nI have a stack of IDS issues piled high in my room. As I go back through the semester's first few papers, the first thing that comes to mind is the tsunami that hit Southeast Asia in December. The question rolling around my head during winter break was, "How would we make this matter to IU students?"\nThen came a string of national and local news stories -- from Gov. Mitch Daniels and President Bush's inauguration to elections in Iraq that became a topic of our News Analysis column, which focused on explaining difficult international and national stories.\nA series of sexual assault incidents hit campus throughout the semester, and we investigated them to see if this was becoming a growing trend on campus.\n'The Game' canceled a concert planned near Little 500, the actual race came and went and Team Major Taylor came under fire after we investigated the team and organization for weeks. \nTwo IU students passed away and one went missing; two of them, thousands of miles away, the other in our front yard. One was a soldier in Afghanistan, and it prompted us to take a deeper look into the deaths of Indiana's troops overseas.\nAll semester I've been on edge, anxious, restless, concerned and, largely, not myself. I guess that all comes from being responsible for the daily news on this campus, regularly criticized by the entire student body and my closest friends. There have been times when I didn't want to come in the newsroom, or check my e-mail or answer phone calls. But then I would realize that this kind of opportunity would never arise again. So I would kick myself and then ask, "How would we make the next issue matter to IU students?"\nThroughout the semester I've realized that this was my goal. The intention of any editor in chief should be to get into the minds of readers to understand what concerns them. From hiring a public editor who monitored our coverage to a daytime Web editor to update stories online, we tried to make the IDS as student-reader friendly as possible. When I was in the newsroom, late at night editing the final draft of page one, I tried to look at the page as a reader. And I woke up the next day with what you were thinking about on my mind. When I wake up Sunday, I will no longer be a cog in IU's student machine, but a graduate, an alumnus and someone without a job.\nI'll wake up without the enormous responsibility I felt all semester, the responsibility that made me endlessly anxious, restless and worried. In ways it will be a huge relief. But it really will be the most depressing morning because I won't have to ask myself, "How will we make this matter to IU students?"\nI tried my best getting in your heads for a semester. And when I failed, you let me know. For that, and for reading, thank you.