The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/category/opinion/lettersfrom/page/2/)
We are here to work for you, as we have been since 1880. Still, we ask big questions and imagine new possibilities. Still, we uncover messy and complicated truths and tell the stories that emerge.
The Cornell Daily Sun will be on hiatus for the upcoming winter break to provide our editors, writers and hard-working staff with an opportunity to bring balance to their title of “student journalist.”
I’m appreciative of my peers, who I’ve watched embrace the hurdles of this semester with open arms. They’ve worked through the regular challenges of a paper — difficult deadlines, impossible business conditions and ever-changing news cycles. They’ve persevered across the new challenges of our paper — staggered hours, solitary working conditions, long days of screen time, differing time zones and internet flubs. And most starkly, they’ve confronted intangible difficulty — COVID-19 itself, loneliness and the loss of their own loved ones. But still, night after night, they’ve tried their hardest to bring the campus happenings to you.
I can’t thank them enough.
When we return after the break, The Sun will be in the hands of the 139th editorial compets, a group of candidates for our 35 or so leadership positions. During these first weeks, they’ll be trained in the work of the nation’s oldest continuously independent college daily; I know that they’ll rise gracefully to the challenge.
Until then, stay safe, wear a mask — we’ll be back before you know it.
— M. Z.
Today is the final day of print publication in 2020 for The Cornell Daily Sun. A departure from our normal schedule, we will publish regularly after Thanksgiving break online only. For the rest of the semester, the sturdy doors at 139 W State Street won’t see the normal influx of editors rushing in and out to make a paper, as our staff returns to their homes and bunkers down until the spring.
We adore the comfort and cadence of our print paper, and — not unlike the sunshine in Ithaca — the print edition of The Cornell Daily Sun will return in February.
In the meantime, we’ll continue our steady reporting at cornellsun.com; if you have comments, compliments, concerns or qualms, do reach out to [email protected] — we’d love to hear from you.
—M.Z.
Your voice and your story matters, now.
As deadlines creep and finals loom, The Sun will begin a brief pause in publication today. For the next two weeks, our staff will set down their reporting hats to — hopefully — rub sleep from their eyes, pass exams, polish up final papers and take a well-deserved break from the whirlwind that this semester has been. These past few months, The Sun and its peers again demonstrated the need for quality, independent journalism on college campuses. As countless voices sought outlets, The Sun created a forum for students, faculty, alumni and prospective Cornellians to hear each other in a time when our voices are farther apart than ever. With the loss of pre-lecture grumblings and coffee-counter conversations, the importance of a space to share information and insight is clear.
From the editors:
From our office on 139 W. State Street, we try to serve the public by producing consistent, comprehensive reporting. We continue to bring you recent, responsible reporting regarding changes to campus and to the city online as they happen. But due to circumstances bigger than The Sun, we will cease regular print production after spring break until the fall. If our papers feel thin these next two weeks, know that we reduce our production to lessen the burden on the staffers and editors who work silently behind the scenes to bring the pages to your hands. We aim to always bring the highest quality coverage we can; but as our student staff is scattered across the globe and governments recommend cutting nonessential in-person work, we find that the best way to communicate to our readers will be in our online coverage.
The 138th board is equipped and eager to embrace the unpredictable upcoming year.
It is now what Dickens would call the spring of hope my dear 138s, and I have complete faith that you will be able to weather the storms ahead and keep The Sun shining.
Twenty years old and retired — that’s the dream. For the 137th Editorial Board of The Cornell Daily Sun, this will become our reality as we step back from checking Slack and our emails every 30 seconds to give a new set of editors the chance to make The Sun shine. During the process The Sun so fondly knows as compet, these editors-to-be will step up to the plate and take on the late nights, take out the Oxford commas and work toward being elected into an editorship on the 138th Editorial Board. Though it will be a very stark change of pace for those of us on the 137th Editorial Board, we will take a step back, to allow these editors the chance to learn and grow. Come March, they lead The Sun into a new year with their names glowing brightly on the masthead that has held its former editors’ names since 1880.
Each Cornellian brings nearly two decades worth of life experiences to the Hill before we begin to change and be changed by Cornell. In those formative years — spent oceans, state-lines or maybe just a TCAT ride away from our collective home on campus — our communities decided for us whether we wear tennis shoes or sneakers, whether you see actual culinary value in a CTB bagel and whether we deem it acceptable to wear anything thicker than a windbreaker in September. But the places we call home before we arrived on campus, equipped with red lanyards and the identities we brought from those homes, also shape how we react to meeting our often wealthy, artistically talented peers. They affect how absurd we find “a portrait of Jesus with condoms taped to his nipples” in our living space. They determine how desirable we feel in the dating-verse of Cornell.