Letter From The Editors

By Jingwen Ni and Lea YamashiroJournalist Adrienne Clarkson once said, “Each of us is carving a stone, erecting a column, or cutting a piece of stained glass in the construction of something much bigger than ourselves.” Every human who walks the Samo grounds adds a little piece to a larger puzzle that is constantly growing, shifting and morphing. Samo’s unique atmosphere breeds something within all students as they face the transformative winds of high school: the desire for movement - a hunger for change.With this, we welcome you to The Samohi’s 2018-2019 year with a theme most will find familiar: Under Construction.As the editor-in-chiefs this year, we are proud to announce that, just like our school, we are under a bit of “construction.” After years with similar formats and little variation, we proudly present to you a new design layout; if you hadn’t noticed, our front page looks a little different. This is our first step in our gradual transition. Just like Samo demolished the old Science Building to make room for the Discovery Building, we said goodbye to an old front-page look and welcomed a new one.We greatly value the importance of traditional newspaper styles and practices, but we are also trying to create a new, unique aesthetic. As we slowly integrate more visual elements into our paper this year, our goal is to create a more engaging, seamless harmony of text and image. Despite these shifts, our role and purpose as a publication does not change; we are first and foremost a newspaper. We take immense pride as the story-tellers for the Samo community, and strive collectively to produce a paper with finesse and integrity. This year, we will continue to diligently carry out our mission statement: “The Samohi serves to provide our community of students, staff, parents and more with an accurate, ethical, unbiased, professional publication that strives to create awareness, seek out the truth from a diversity of sources and tell the whole story for our readers as a learning process that preserves the history of our school.”In addition to our mission statement, we also dreamed up a few specific goals that we hope to achieve this year: 

1. The Samohi will work to cultivate a larger online presence and audience. Our website (thesamohi.com) will be updated with articles more frequently to ensure the timeliness and relevance of our publication. We set out this year with the hopes of reaching more people, more directly via social media and other internet platforms.

1. The paper as a whole will become more representative of the melting pot of ideas that defines to our campus and community; we will work harder to open our doors as a more accessible platform for a diversity of opinions and healthy academic discourse.

• The Samohi staff will, with time, become not only experienced high school-journalists, but a cohesive group of “Samo-experts” capable of reporting the relevant stories of our community with an unwavering dedication to precision and accuracy.

  These goals would never be attainable without a hardworking and dedicated staff of writers and editors. Our publication is completely student-run, and we conduct ourselves at a professional level comparable to any corporate publication. However, the student-power behind our work should signify our commitment to presenting readers with information that we, as students, deem important and pertinent to a student publication. As journalists in this day and age, there are exterior voices coming from all directions, telling us what is important, what is “newsworthy,” what is true and false, what to believe, how to report and how to think. Despite this, our publication represents what we like to call “Independence of Mind.” As a close-knit group of staff members, we ground each other and ourselves with our combined senses of humor, realism, wit and kindness, reminding each other always: we are here to tell our story, the story of Samo. In order to be more representative of the opinions of all of students, minority and majority, we strongly encourage you, readers, to contribute! Yes, we have an amazing staff capable of the impossible, but we want to publish writing from outside of our little journalism haven in I202. Give us the best you’ve got. Give us your thoughts, desires, rants, wishes, dreams...or maybe just a cartoon or two. We are open to anything and everything, so feel free to approach us any time with an idea to discuss. Our door is always open. As a publication, we would like to thank you, our readers, for your continued support. We would especially to like thank our subscribers and advertisers for their financial contributions, without which we would not be able to print at all. As our society barrels toward a fully digitized world, the tradition of print journalism sadly decreases in popularity and demand. So, thank you for your outlasting appreciation of print media - one of the oldest and most historic traditions of our society. Not only is journalism an integral part of societal fabric, but it is one that has graced Samo’s halls for over a hundred years. You are not only supporting the paper we print today, but all of the history that comes with it. All that being said, we are thrilled for this year. We have a feeling it’s going to be just swell. Thank you,Jingwen Ni  and  Lea Yamashiro (Co-Editors-in-Chief)