Letters From

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: Growing Season

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Thank you for reading our paper; we couldn’t make it without your support. Try new things this semester, stretch your wings and let yourself grow — but remember that The Sun will appear every day, and you always have a home within our pages.

Columns

SULLIVAN BAKER | A Shattered Rock and Opened Gates

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In 1943, as World War II raged in Europe and Pacific, Ithaca lost The Cornell Daily Sun. From its ashes sprang an unfamiliar new paper, The Cornell Bulletin, which would exist for three years until The Sun returned to campus. Though The Bulletin was short-lived, its impact would be felt far beyond its run of publication, because it inaugurated a new era of Cornell student journalism. The paper’s inception marked the end of The  Cornell Daily Sun’s systematic exclusion of women from leadership, which had persisted since 1880. The Bulletin was the first Cornell paper of record with women at the helm, and these groundbreaking student journalists ensured that the gates of the reestablished Sun would be permanently open to women.

Columns

SIMS | As Seen on TV

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The best fictional dramatization of a newsroom is the 2012-2014 HBO series The Newsroom. The best dramatization of a newsroom, though, is the Sun office. They have a lot in common: ringing phones, dry humor, hair-trigger reactivity, lots of take-out, late nights, more coffee, love-hating co-workers, excitement, frustration. It’s regrettable that The Newsroom doesn’t have scenes about being late to a meeting because you were playing mini golf with the other editors or when you have an office slumber party and watch The Proposal. But their main characterizations about journalists — as seekers of goodness and truth, tireless and exhilarated workers and self-righteous investigators — mapped accurately to my time at The Sun.

Columns

REYNOLDS | A Girl, a Newspaper, a Voice

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As I reflect on my time at Cornell, The Sun will shine brightly as one of my most lasting and positive experiences. Not because it jump started my career as a journalist or gave me the thrill of seeing my name attached to a published piece, not because it allowed me to speak to science luminaries like Steve Squyres or Carla Gomez (although I covet the audio recordings of our interviews), but because I got to work with and learn from a talented team of passionate writers, reporters and friends. Working as a writer and editor for The Sun primarily taught me about journalism, but it also taught me about myself (cheesy, I know). Ultimately, it solidified my long-held appreciation for good writing and reporting. What I learned about journalism, through my time at the Sun, is reflected in the words of author John Irving — “Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.” It is the responsibility of a journalist to report on what is noticed and, importantly, what people fail to notice.