Dearest readers,
Welcome back! We hope you had a rejuvenating winter break. We’re thrilled to be serving as editors-in-chief for The Argus this semester.
As you may know, our paper is named after Argus Panoptes, the 100-eyed giant from Greek mythology. This semester, for the first time since either of us started at The Argus, our masthead surpasses Argus Panoptes with a total of 53 magnificent people on our masthead—106 eyes!
Our staff is keeping all these eyes out for the beautiful art, electrifying sports, and engaging events that go on at our school. We’re extremely grateful for everything our many members do. We also look forward to executing initiatives initiated by our venerable predecessors, Executive Editors Sabrina Ladiwala ’24 and Elias Mansell ’24.
One of these is the Ethics & Equity Committee, which will hold recurring meetings about journalistic ethics and Argus policy. There, we hope to keep discussing how we can use our resources to both serve our community through our coverage and make The Argus a feasible time commitment for as many students as possible.
To that end, we are continuing The Argus’ incessant push to fundraise for our student workers’ wages, including the Argus Voices Fund, which provides paid reporting positions to low-income students of color. If you, your friends, your family, strangers you meet on the street, or your long-lost situationships for whom you seek Dill & Doe’s advice want to donate, either to the paper as a whole or specifically to the Voices Fund, please do so!
With the Frank Center for Public Affairs newly open and construction of the new science building underway, we’re excited to see Church Street become more of a town square, filled with public space. As this letter’s title suggests, we want to be more than a newspaper, we want to be the center of discourse and communication on campus. Accordingly, we hope The Argus will grow in its role as a virtual public square, where we can all pause and ponder, rage against the machine, and agree to disagree. We intend to be a platform for everyone on campus. Whether your passion is club recruitment, event promotion, quarter-page tributes to George Santos, or just having fun, we encourage you to take out personal ads in the paper.
We’re also delighted to be reviving The Ampersand, our paper’s satire and humor section. It’s available only in print, so be sure to grab a copy. We hope it will be a place to riff on campus culture and current events. The email inboxes of our new Ampersand Editors are open for submissions!
In addition, we hope to codify and simplify some of our internal policies to ensure fair, equitable, and holistic reporting. We’re working on institutional memory (because preserving knowledge in a college club can be like trying to label toxic waste for posterity) in order to set future Argus staff and readers up for success.
Now and forever (until we retire at the end of the semester), please reach out to us with questions, concerns, article pitches, complaints, refutations, and ways to build bridges or collaborate with your group. We want to hear from you!
Sincerely,
Sam Hilton ’25 and Anne Kiely ’24
Editors-in-Chief
Sam Hilton can be reached at shilton@wesleyan.edu.
Anne Kiely can be reached at afkiely@wesleyan.edu.