“Our staff is committed fully to bringing truthful, unbiased story-telling to all members of the Samford community.”
This sentence resides at the core of The Samford Crimson’s mission statement, found on the back cover of each and every one of our weekly papers. Truth, without bias, for the entire Samford community. That has been our driving force for as long as I can remember.
Each member of the Crimson takes this task upon themselves every year, new and old. From contributing writers all the way up to the Editor-in-Chief, everyone involved in the Crimson unites under this care.
I write this letter at the beginning of the year as a reminder of what we do here and who we are here for. If you are a freshman reading this, we write for you. If you are a tenured professor, we write for you. We write for everyone in between; all joined together under the Samford name.
Us Crimson members also write for ourselves, as students of this fine university.
We do not write stories about parking and construction because we hate Samford. We’re not typing up smear campaigns in hopes that local papers will clip and use our own words against our school. We write about Samford because we love Samford and everything that comes with it.
This is a place many of us – myself included – are so beyond joyful to call our second home.
I believe the beauty of Samford is found in how different we all have the potential to be. Most of us here unite under the truth of Jesus. But God did not make us to be carbon copies of each other. God made us to discuss, to debate, to love and to learn along the way.
We write the hard stories because our job is to report the news. When students disagree with the university, we talk about it. When the community feels hurt by decisions made by the university they are a part of, our job is to give them a platform for their voices to be heard. When the university wants to explain its decisions, we want to be the ones to bridge the gap between administration and students.
Throughout the rough stories and slow news weeks, the Crimson’s job is to keep our readers informed about the Samford community.
