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How wide a scope should we encompass?

As it goes at every credible news organization, it is our job to think of what is important to cover for our community.

But as the newspaper of a small, private liberal arts college, it is especially difficult to know how wide we should enlarge our scope.

Covering the stories of Mills students, organizations and institutions is our primary goal. Second comes unique stories from the larger East Bay community. The war in Iraq affects us all as citizens of the United States, but it doesn’t have much to do with Mills in particular. Russia’s invasion of Georgia is unquestionably important history in the making, but that has even less to do with the day-to-day workings of our college and its community.

National newspapers are better equipped to cover such complex international issues. They have reporters who live in Iraq and Georgia, who have access to the people who make the decisions that make the story. The best The Campanil can do is borrow those reporters’ information – why shouldn’t the students get it right from the source?

Still, for posterity, if not for the student populace’s knowledge of current events, it seems we should cover the events affecting the world at large. No matter how small our campus is, there is much more to the world than the things that happen here and it seems small-minded of us to ignore everything and everyone else.

Yet we recognize that “the rest of the world” is a giant scope to try and include in a biweekly publication. How are we supposed to choose what is most important?

Clearly, it is a complicated issue, but we need to start somewhere. In the News section of this issue, there is a half page of “world events” – things that matter to us all and we would like our readership to be informed about.

Consider this a test-run. It’s not a lot of information, but somewhere to start in your pursuit of more information.