Dear Readers,

This year, we served as the Editors-in-Chief of the Oracle. This came with many accomplishments and challenges, including typical leadership bumps in the road as well as extra pressure, which was a result of our role as a media source.

We lead a paper that has won national awards, including one for an editorial about the implementation of gender neutral facilities. The paper as a whole has won regional awards for individual and cumulative work, and we were proud and honored to have been a part of it all.

However, our time was riddled with deterrents that came as a result of distrust in the media. As phrases like “fake news” were dropped without thought about the meaning, the importance of honest, unbiased reporting became even more crucial. Even the most pristine reporting was often dubbed “fake news” or labeled as writing with a “liberal bias.” This lack of media literacy  forced us to be even more aware of even the slightest errors in our own reporting.

It is our hope that you found our coverage clean, neutral and accurate, as we spent hours in the office reading, rereading and scrutinizing the work of ourselves, the staffers and the editors. However, it wasn’t just us who put in the time to deliver the best coverage possible. Without the staff, editors, advisers and school administrators helping us, we would be nowhere.

We rely on the South administration for fact-checking on current events, and we rely on all editors and staffers to write cohesive stories about it all. Finally, we need the advisers to be the final check before it all goes to print. Each story, picture and page layout gets hours upon hours of attention before the paper appears outside the SAO.

And we rely on you all. A newspaper without readers is like honey without bees. Our readers are what makes this all possible, and we are so grateful to have had the readership we did this year. The reactions we see every issue motivate us to keep working hard, because, in the end, the Oracle is a reflection on student greatness.

We covered stories ranging from individual profiles highlighting students in our Artist Alert and Humans of the Halls columns, to in-depth coverage about sexual assault and the importance of self defense, to sports season overviews. This coverage is something we take pride in on behalf of the staff and editors. We are proud that we were willing to take on these stories in order to bring hard-hitting content to the paper in a respectful, serious manner.

With this in mind, it has truly been an honor to have been trusted with this position. Our perspective of the paper, journalism and the school has totally shifted because of our experiences. We humbly thank everyone who reads the Oracle, and we thank those who scrutinize it, because even if you don’t see it, we take all criticism into consideration with the final goal of enhancing the paper.

Despite the pride we feel for our work on the paper this year, and the immeasurable work we, and everyone on staff put into the paper, we know that it can only go up from here.