Letter From the Editors
The Echo Editorial Board of 2021-22
We, the editorial staff of the Echo for the 2021-22 school year, are dedicated to providing Augsburg community members of all identities and experiences a fair and open platform to state their grievances, inform the community, critique the systems in power and celebrate each other. In order to ensure our publication remains a well balanced, fair, and high quality student publication we have created this list of goals and commitments.
The goals of the editorial staff of the Echo for this year are as follows:
- Increasing readership and recruitment
The Echo aims to expand its readership, recruit new writers, and increase writer retention.
- Establish a community within the Echo and each section
The Echo will be increasing its in-person community offerings whenever possible and in accordance with COVID-19 protocol as well as collaborating with different organizations at Augsburg and in the greater Minneapolis area to expand our group of writers.
- Centering communities that are BiPOC and/or marginalized
The Echo aims to center voices that are frequently silenced and erased in the media – namely, stories concerning marginalized communities. We are committed to being an explicitly anti-racist paper and using our platform to denounce white supremacy and uplift writers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC).
- National and Transnational coverage
The Echo aims to increase the scope of its coverage to include national and transnational stories, while keeping them pertinent to Augsburg’s population by including commentary from experts from Augsburg’s community.
Our commitments to the Augsburg community and the surrounding communities in the Cedar-Riverside and Minneapolis area are as follows:
- High Journalistic Standards
The Echo aims to publish accurate, polished coverage in accordance with the journalistic standards of AP style.
- Be Politically Active
The Echo aims to be politically engaged in the stories that it covers, and will serve as a means for Augsburg students to become politically informed and understand issues that are happening in their community.
The Echo supports survivors of sexual abuse and prioritizes accountability.
Given recent history in the Echo space and the Augsburg community as a whole, our editorial board wants to reiterate our support for survivors of all forms of emotional and sexual abuse, harassment, and other forms of misconduct. Last year, due to events over the summer, we stated that individuals found to be sexual abusers will not be allowed to write for the Echo or in any Echo community spaces and still stand by this statement. We’d like to explicitly state that this policy extends to all Augsburg community members found to be sexual abusers, including and especially individuals in the Echo community, regardless of status.
Our mission as Augsburg’s student newspaper is to uplift the voices of our student body and provide a platform for students to speak about topics that matter to them. We recognize that this work requires doing our part to cultivate a safe space on campus. If we remain silent in the face of sexual misconduct, we create an environment that tacitly endorses sexual abusers and contributes to a culture that systematically silences survivors of sexual misconduct. In accordance with our commitment to centering voices that are often silenced and marginalized, if members of the Augsburg community who are survivors of sexual abuse wish to share their stories in The Echo, we welcome them to do so.
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