We have recently decided to begin printing reporters' e-mail addresses underneath their bylines on stories that appear on the front page of The Daily Collegian. Many Pennsylvanian newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Harrisburg Patriot-News, include the e-mail addresses of reporters with every local article that they publish. Although it's not the only reason why we have chosen to do this, we thought that it would be a good idea to follow an industry trend that has produced positive results as far as encouraging discussion between the newspaper and the community.

We hope that by making reporters' e-mail addresses more accessible to the reader, we will be able to participate in a livelier civil discourse with our sources and, more importantly, with our audience. After all, almost all students' names and e-mail addresses are listed on the Penn State's Web directory anyway. We're just eliminating one step for the readers who feel compelled enough to write e-mail to a reporter in the first place.

This is also an excellent opportunity for readers to write story suggestions and tips to our busy reporters. Although readers should have felt comfortable sending e-mail to us before we started publishing addresses, now we have made it even easier for them to write about what we could have done to make the story better, or to whom we could have talked to get another angle.

Readers should note, however, that writing these e-mails does not necessarily mean that they are writing a letter to the editor. These e-mails should mostly be addressed to the individual reporter, although at times we could decide to publish particularly informative or compelling e-mails to reporters.

Because this is a new step for the Collegian, we are implementing the process slowly by printing reporters' e-mails on front-page stories only. We are also publishing only Collegian staff members' e-mail addresses, so reporters in training will not have their addresses published with their stories. Readers can tell who training reporters are by their "For the Collegian" byline. If the reporters who receive e-mail messages from readers report that it is working well, then we will publish e-mail addresses with every local story written by a staff member that appears in the Collegian.

Patricia Tisak
editor in chief