Letter from the editor: Tell your stories — make UA history

As the semester unfolds, the Arizona Daily Wildcat is striving to broaden its digital presence: In addition to our website, you can catch us on Facebook and Twitter. We’re playing with Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. We’re trying to be all over the Internet.

We don’t have much of a choice, really. Given the floundering state of print media at the professional and collegiate levels, news outlets everywhere are under pressure to make the Internet work for them.

But what’s important to recognize as my staff and I explore digital media strategies is that the Daily Wildcat staff is more than a bunch of Facebooking, Insta-tweeting automatons. Surprise: We’re students.

Backwards curmudgeons and the technologically challenged can gripe all they want about the rise of electronic screens and the death of human interaction, but the truth is that there’s a real person behind every Facebook post and Twitter update, and they want to connect with you. What’s your story?

The Wildcat is staffed by storytellers, though our mediums vary. I love the written word, and plenty of Wildcat writers feel the same. But visuals editor Kyle Wasson is an ace at telling a story in a single photo. Resident videographer extraordinaire Tyler Besh can tell a story in three minutes or less through his camera. And it’s up to digital media editor Casey Lewandrowski to make sure we say it all in 140 characters or fewer.

So even though we’ll spend a lot of time talking about how to make you notice our Facebook posts, and we’ll probably blow up your Twitter feed on multiple occasions, we’re not doing it for the clicks.

OK, we’re doing it for the clicks too. But we’re mostly doing it for you. Tell us your story.

Occasionally, UA alumni will email or call me about an article in our archives that they somehow stumbled upon 10 pages deep in Google results. These articles are often stories published long before I joined the Daily Wildcat staff, sometimes decades ago. Still, I go looking for them.

What I find interesting is that a story in the Wildcat has stayed with those people, even years after it was published. But I’m entering my second semester as the Daily Wildcat’s editor-in-chief and my last semester at the UA. I’ve come to realize that the best and worst moments of my life have happened in the last three and a half years, and, like for many of the alumni who have contacted me, some of those moments are preserved in the archives of the Daily Wildcat.

The Wildcat’s roots aren’t in ink and paper. Its roots are in stories that matter.

Regardless of what form it is published in, the work of the Daily Wildcat preserves the best and worst moments of the UA’s history, and maybe of yours too. You will hold on to the stories that come out of these years. You’ll want a record of them.

And maybe in a couple of decades, you’ll contact another editor-in-chief, looking for a story published this semester, because it once mattered to you.

— Kristina Bui is the editor-in-chief of the Arizona Daily Wildcat. She can be reached at
editor@wildcat.arizona.edu or on Twitter via @kbui1.