Illustration by Bell Jackson At the beginning of the year, in the very first letter I wrote to our readers, I made a promise that The Alabamian would act with integrity and work hard to keep our readers informed. I am happy to say that I believe we have kept this promise, but there is another promise that I made. I promised that when we made a mistake that we would own up to it.
Recently, an article was published in The Alabamian titled “SGA town hall discusses UM sexual assault policies.” This article in no way met the standards that The Alabamian wishes to hold itself too and contained several errors that were not caught during our final checks. A complete list of the corrections for this article can be found on our front page and on our website.
While, I do indeed have many reasons I could give as to how this mistake was allowed to happen, it ultimately does not matter. We made a mistake, and I am here to apologize to you, our readers, and assure you that, not only have we worked hard to correct our mistake, but that we will be working equally hard to avoid making this mistake in the future.
Now, please forgive me for being blunt, but there is another issue I must address, and I feel it is best if I say it directly rather than leaving anything to the imagination. I am aware that some members of UM faculty and staff believe that we have been targeting members of the administration in order to make them look bad, and I would like to state here that this is not the case.
The goal of The Alabamian is to report the news; we do not act as public relations for the university or any of its members. There certainly may be times where readers will form a negative opinion of an individual after reading an article, but we will never publish a news article with the goal of painting an individual in a negative light.
To anyone who feels that we have done this, I sincerely apologize that you have been left with this impression.
Going forward, The Alabamian will be modifying our training for staff and our editorial process. We will continue to improve so that we can provide you, our readers, with the best possible publication.
Harrison Neville is the previous Editor in chief for The Alabamian. He is a fourth-year English major whose hobbies include reading, hiking, cooking and writing. He has previously worked for The Alabamian as a managing editor, distribution manager, copy editor and SGA columnist.
