Sa aming mga Mangbabasa,
It never feels good to come home from the Press Center early enough to see the sunrise.
It always hurts to look down our list of stories: Killing Me Softly, Preserving Revolutionary Principles, Traumatic Legacies of Civil Warfare; and wonder if it is a choice or an obligation to cover these issues.
Sometimes it is painful to open up a new TWANAS and see a typo, an incorrect word spacing or a pixelated image. But what doesn’t hurt is when people send us a short Facebook message, or email of appreciation.
We are elated when a reader approaches a writer and explains how a story altered their perception of an issue, when a reader is offended at a satire, or informs us that we may have missed an extremely important element of a story.
It inflates our chest when sources ask us to sit in on a closed meeting, ask us to report on an international political superstar, or when they trust us to write a hard to handle, sensitive story.
It fills us with pride that Chancellor of our University bestowed to TWANAS the Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity.
All of these instances outweigh our trivial, personal difficulties when publishing this newspaper. We realize then, that it is neither choice nor obligation, but a calling to cover what we cover.
A calling to inform our readers on the SUA elections, to explicate a deep and complicated debate on Ethnic Studies, to expose films that would otherwise go unnoticed, to present a Cornel West our readers may have missed in person.
Nothing in this paper is ever printed out of obligation or mandate, but printed because we are called by our readers to publish an alternative press. You, our reader, compel us.
Salamat po,
TWANAS Press
