Well, congratulations on choosing to spend another year with us at Grand Valley State University—and thanks for picking up the Lanthorn.

This year, the Lanthorn staff prepares to celebrate 50 years of newspapers at GVSU. That’s 50 years of sleepless production nights, 50 years of pestering administrators and exercising our right to know where our tuition money’s going, and 50 years of enduring harassment as we seek to expose the hidden or disfigured truths of university operations (and I mean harassment—one of our earliest editors was charged by the Ottawa County Circuit Court for obscenity, and our paper was consequently shut down).

But just like truth, itself, our newspaper has endured, even as it passed through countless ink-stained hands.

Sure, it’s had a few facelifts. We’ve taken the news to the Internet with an improved webpage and created mobile apps to keep up with the times, but our pursuit of the truth is as firm and fervent as ever.

If you stick with us, you can expect to read balanced reports of university proceedings and occurrences. We’ll keep you up to speed on the activity of GVSU’s various governance boards, including the Student Senate, Board of Trustees and University Academic Senate; its prolific sports programs; its budding artists; the unique students that make up its student body; and more.

If we neglect to cover a topic of your interest or if you ever have a concern or question about the university that you want addressed, send a tip to any one of our editors either by dropping by the office in the basement of the Kirkhof Center or by emailing us. We’ll launch an investigation and write up a piece with all the answers you’re looking for.

While we enjoy working for your educational gains, we also value your potential contributions as writers, photographers and artists. We want to get our readers involved in the conversation, so we’ve opened a number of different mediums for you to be printed or have your voice heard.

The easiest way is to comment on our online stories or submit Letters to the Editor. We’ll generally pull a few to run in print.

We also solicit student opinions for our Question of the Issue, so if you’d like to have your photo printed, linger outside our office door on production days. Following each issue, take the time to answer our Question of the Issue poll on our website so we can better understand our readership.

Finally, we know how exciting it can be to see your name in print, so we like to offer our readers the chance to gain recognition for their work. We accept student and faculty submissions for a Your Space page, which will highlight creative writing pieces, photography and art by talented readers.

So get involved with us.

Let us be the bearers of news—good or bad—and we won’t let you down.