Under the tenure of the 128th editorial board, editorials — which represent The Herald’s institutional opinion on current affairs — will be written by the editorial page board, a group of students who have no role in shaping our news content.
In line with the policy of the 127th editorial board, we believe that a divide between news and opinions is integral to the work that we do as the newspaper of public record on campus. We would therefore like that divide to be reflected in the way our newsroom operates. To that end, the 128th editorial board — which actively shapes both the conception and execution of our news stories — will not be writing editorials.
Editorial page boards that are separate from the reporting side of a paper are a fairly standard practice for most self-styled objective journalistic publications in the United States, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. The idea behind the separation is to ensure that reporters’ and their editors’ only consideration is uncovering the truth, rather than confirming an interpretation of events.
The 128th editorial board will continue to use editor’s notes to explain our editorial decisions when required, but we will not use editor’s notes to opine on the news. We hope that this transparency about the division of labor within our office will help increase trust in the integrity of both our news and opinions sections.
The editorials produced by the editorial page board will continue to be titled with the word “Editorial” and will appear under the opinions tab on our website. In the print edition, editorials will continue to appear in our commentary pages. Editorial positions are voted on and signed by the entire editorial page board.
Under the 127th editorial board, editorials were written by the 127th editorial board. Under the 126th editorial board, editorials were written by the 126th editorial board in the fall and an editorial page board in the spring.
Editor’s Notes are written by the 128th editorial board: Elena Renken ’19, Kasturi Pananjady ’19, Alex Skidmore ’19, Julianne Center ’19, Hattie Xu ’19 and Madison Rivlin ’19.
