Publisher's Note: Why we so slow?

The Independent is three years old this year.

With my departure, there will be no remaining original staff and the torch shall have officially been passed. Over the years, we've made a name for ourselves by getting stories better or faster (or sometimes both) than the other publications and occasionally asserting our home-turf supremacy over the likes of Newsday.

But we've never done it consistently. We have a small, dedicated group of people out there reporting the news. Even when it may seem from our site that we're not doing much, we're always busy with investigative stories and general canvassing of the campus.

The staff is constantly preoccupied by the fundamental questions that plague us here at Stony Brook. Where are we going? Is Kenny a good president? Is our tuition worth it? Is our money being wasted by USG? Does anyone even care about anything?

Having been here since the beginning, I have seen many promising stories go down the tubes. Stories that took time, thinking, and effort. Stories that, just by doing the research for, have helped us learn about how things work so we can do better in the future. But those stories didn't get published and for good reasons, whether it be by tight-lipped sources or an inability to get it good enough.

Journalists are also a very busy lot. It's easy to say the Statesman sucks (though not so much now than during some periods in the past) but you have to realize they also have to publish twice a week, every week. That's a lot of work. It takes us a whole night just to put together one page for the Off The Wall posters. We're all students, too and many of us are involved with other activities.

The key difference at the Independent is not that we're better or worse people than the other publications . It's our system. We do what we can, when we can. We take our time and we don't publish for the sake of publishing. We try to get you the truth when it matters most; when there is danger or excitement.

The truth is, this job is hard. And sometimes, we just can't to it well enough in the amount of time it needs to be done. This will improve as our newspaper matures; we're still young. But the reason why we miss some stories or that some stories are late is because we want to make sure things are right and that the information is actually valuable to you.

I can only hope that the next generation continues to make progress and learns from the experiences of the last three years.

Journalism is not something you do. It's something you are, even at a "school newspaper."