By Jonathan Smith, Editor in Chief

A quick look through any old issue of the Optimist will quickly tell you you’re no longer dealing with the same paper as last year.

You can see it in our nameplate. You can see it in the fonts. You can see it in the staff box and on down the list of nerdy journalism terms.

Why do I think it should matter? Why should it matter that new staff members you may or may not know have taken over for graduates you might have never heard of?

Maybe a more experienced editor would fill the rest of this column with rhetoric about how readers will get the same product
they have come to expect over the years. How all this change doesn’t in fact change a thing and shouldn’t matter.

However, I would never espouse that. And here’s why I hope it does matter to you.

I hope readers judge this newspaper based on the merits of this staff-not some preconceived bias or notion caused by graduated Optimist ex-patriots who no longer attend this school.

To sources: If you have been burned in the past, odds are it was by no one on this staff today. To readers: If you didn’t like the way something was covered, there are precious few staffers here who played a vital role in shaping past coverage.

That doesn’t mean that won’t ever happen again. It’s a long year ahead of us, and I’ve got plenty of time to make a few friends and enemies along the way. Just don’t decide which you are based on issues with which this staff has had little control.

But I hope all this change resonates with the staff as well. Here’s what I hope it means to the paper.

The Optimist is only as good as its most recent issue. Being named the best university paper in Texas at a conference five months ago, although certainly something to be proud of, is no reason to gloat today.

To our readers, the 2004-05 Optimist will not strive to be the best college newspaper of 2003-04. We’ll work to be this year’s best the only way we know how.

And along the way, we’re bound to do some things like they’ve been done in the past because that has obviously worked. We’re bound to cover many of the same things, hold some of the same opinions and resurrect some old issues.

That’s what we aim for: to offer something completely new and different just the way it’s always been.