If you’re a regular reader — or even if you’re not — of these Opinions pages, you are probably aware that a recurring theme of the Editorial Board’s views is greater transparency and increased communication between the administration and students. That’s a great refrain for The Daily to echo every couple of weeks or so, but it seems a little hypocritical to throw around such buzz words and not hold yourself as an organization accountable to the same ideal that you have for the University at large.

One of the marvelous things about the newspaper you’re currently reading is that it is entirely student-run and student-managed. Students write and edit the articles, sell the ads, make the business decisions, lay the pages out and are responsible for the start-to-finish process of producing a paper every night. As an independent and self-sufficient newspaper, the University cannot exercise control over The Daily and has no say as to what gets published and what doesn’t.

There are a couple of communication professors who check in periodically, provide unobtrusive oversight and — after publication — will notify the editor-in-chief if he makes an editorial decision they question. But beyond that, The Daily is really just a small band of extremely dedicated and hardworking students who are willing to pour countless hours a week into an often thankless job that certainly does nothing to improve their GPAs. I know just how many hours and just how thankless — and just how unfortunate for the GPA — the job is, because I myself was part of this band just a few months ago.

Until graduating in June, I worked in a variety of capacities and departments at The Daily. I served as staff writer, beat writer, desk editor and managing editor in the news, sports and opinions departments. I also functioned as the de facto editor-in-chief on numerous occasions last year, so I know just how stressful and ambiguous the ultimate decision-making process can be when you have to make snap judgments on a breaking story, the administration’s offices are closed for the night and the police can’t be reached. Yet while my insider perspective affords me a certain sympathy to the constraints these student journalists face, I am nonetheless quite critical of what I have seen over the past four years as sloppy, careless or often just lazy journalism, and have no qualms about calling the staff members out when it occurs.

I am no longer involved in any part of the writing, editing or production process. My only affiliation with the organization now is as Public Editor — a kind of cushy retirement job in which I serve as an impartial commentator on the paper and its coverage. I hope to provide the greater transparency and increased communication that should be demanded not just of the administration but of the student newspaper as well. Many newspapers these days employ someone in a similar watchdog role. News outfits should be publicly held accountable to their readerships, and that’s where you the reader come in.

Whether you’re an administrator who thinks a reporter has not done a fair job — or any job — investigating your side of a story, an athlete who is sick of having your file photos misattributed to one of your teammates in captions, a freshman who can’t believe that there are more typos on the front page than your high school newspaper ever had or just a disgruntled senior who would really like the Sudoku puzzle not to run over the fold anymore (seriously — that was such a problem last year, wasn’t it?), email me and let me know. I probably won’t address the Sudoku complaints, but I will do my best to respond in my biweekly column to other concerns that you, The Daily’s readers, have.

The only revisions my editors are allowed to make are grammatical ones. They cannot change my column’s content in any way, so my opinions will in no way be diluted or altered by The Daily’s staff. I will do my best both to critique the quality of the paper’s reporting and the soundness of its editorial judgments, as well as consider and covey the realities of what it’s like working at The Daily. You may actually agree with The Daily and disagree with me on various issues, or you may disagree with us both. Regardless, I hope that transparency and communication move beyond the Editorials to The Daily itself.

Whitney Sado is a first-year law student. Send her questions, complaints and suggestions as to what you’d like to see addressed at wsado@stanford.edu.