What’s that smell?

That’s the smell of exhaust from all of the cars, trucks, vans, and trailers that have invaded the lonely, quiet campus I remember from the summer.

That’s the smell of excited new and returning students hitting the town with their new friends, or friends they’re reuniting with.

That’s the smell of fresh textbooks filling students’ bags.

That’s the smell of ink on this page of The Daily Eastern News.

Let us be the first to welcome everyone to Eastern for what’s going to be a great fall semester. With the start a new school year comes the start of a new semester at the newspaper.

For those new students who don’t know who we are, The Daily Eastern News is the No. 1 daily newspaper on campus. Likewise, we are the only daily newspaper on campus.

We are here to serve you, to make sure you know all of the important news, events and people on campus.

We are completely student-run. Every day we will have news, sports and opinions. Every Friday, we will publish The Verge, our arts and entertainment section.

The Daily Eastern News aims to offer factually accurate stories on a wide variety of topics of interest. Being a student-run newspaper, we pride ourselves on knowing what people are talking about on campus and being able to write about it.

We want to offer interesting and intriguing news for you to read. Our newspaper is going to cover the Charleston City Council meeting every other Tuesday, but we want to be doing great work with stories that aren’t on a schedule. We want to have stories nobody has ever thought about or feature stories about people on campus who are interesting.

Also, I want to encourage everyone to think about working with us. We invite anyone who has an interest in writing stories, taking photos, writing columns, drawing cartoons, designing pages, or copy editing to walk into our newsroom in Buzzard Hall and ask us how to get involved. We’d love to have you on our staff, but remember that most of the work we offer is on a volunteer basis.

Working with us could be a great experience for anyone. We’re not just writers. As I said before, we’re photographers, designers and artists, too.

So if you feel like getting experience in one of those areas and be a part of something unique, then drop by the newsroom and say hello.

Alex McNamee is a junior journalism major.

He can be reached at 581-2812

or [email protected].