Another semester is coming to a close and few students have spent it working as hard as those on the Optimist staff.

In addition to balancing schoolwork and other on-campus activities, we somehow manage to put in long hours writing stories, designing pages, updating the website and editing photos and videos. Through it all, deadlines are looming over us, adding to the pressure.

We pull all-nighters, go without food and sometimes have to put aside our personal lives to spend more time in the newsroom. During breaking news, we have to drop whatever we are doing and go to work.

Why do we do it?

We take pride in our work. If we didn’t, would we really spend so much time devoted to it? The products we produce are professional and wrought with care. And, not to brag, but our work has won a lot of awards.

Our duty is to keep our readers informed about happenings on campus. We provide a voice that speaks to multiple audiences, not just students, faculty and staff. Our audience also includes alumni, people in the Abilene community and prospective students. People need to be informed about news on and around campus, and we believe it is up to us to keep them updated.

Accuracy is important to us. People always tell stories that vary and it’s hard to discover the truth. We want to be a reliable source for our readers, the source they turn to when other stories disagree. So we put extra effort into fact-checking and citing sources. Yes, this takes up even more of our time, but it is worth it in the end.

Over time, our work tells a story. Anyone who wants to know what took place at ACU during 2013 simply has to browse through stories on the website, or page through the year’s issues. In the past, history was remembered by records kept by newspapers. Even though there are many ways to keeping records now, newspapers are still one of them. Our work keeps a record of ACU’s history.

When it comes to reporting about the university, we don’t pick sides or follow an agenda. When we sense a story, we take the information our sources give us and deliver an unbiased report to our readers. We’re not against anyone.

The news is not something that can be anticipated or predicted. It never stops happening, so we do our best to report what we can in the most professional way possible.

Think about it: If we didn’t do our job, how would anyone know what really goes on around here?