I grappled with writing an introduction for a while until I realized that it was absolutely insignificant.

The purpose of this blog is not to showcase my own writing or thrust my opinions out into the open (although I certainly enjoy doing both). The focus of this blog is on other people, the heart and soul of journalism: telling stories.

As a school newspaper, our goal is to cover the school, to tell the stories of the people at Southwest. But we aren’t always able to do that. There are about 1000 kids in the school and less than ten issues of the paper each year. We look for story ideas in the hallway; we try to be observant of what we see and hear. But all too often the things that we pick up on, the things that are being talked about, are the stories that people already know. I like to think that we go deeper with our stories, that we take things that students might have heard of already and explain more of the how and why, but the fact remains that the people we highlight are often the people who are out in the open, easy to find and ready to be highlighted. We’re missing so many stories.

Every couple of weeks, I will interview a student completely randomly by opening a binder of names of everyone in the school and writing about the first person my finger lands on (provided he or she hasn’t been in the paper before). Unlike last year, I will be uploading Q&A’s instead of short stories. A good writer can take multiple interviews and sources and weave them into a work of art, but in the end, when I’m asking someone to talk solely about their life, the person who can tell the story the best is the person being interviewed.

My hope is that this blog will give a few more students a chance to have their stories heard — a chance that I wholeheartedly believe everyone deserves.