If you’re a returning student, you’ve probably read the Daily before. If you’re a new student, you may hear an upperclassman rant about how biased the Daily is this way or that, or how the reporting and opining unfairly favor one political party or group over another.

If you come to visit our office, you might notice that even our newsroom’s architecture and fixtures appear to be tilted in one way or the other. Coming down our main hall, you’ll find an odd rise in the floor. Be careful; you’ll trip over it if you’re not looking. The giant bulletin board on our wall as you enter the newsroom is a quarter-inch higher on the left side than the right. And our coat rack at the door nearby is conversely higher up on the right side than on the left.

Just like the workers that made imperfect modifications to our office over the summer, our reporters will make mistakes. Our columnists will write opinions you don’t agree with.

But this is a college newspaper, and we treat our work as a learning opportunity. We have two missions: to fairly, completely and accurately report the news, and to provide students with an opportunity to engage the media and act as its agents.

We will learn from the mistakes we make. Many of us have already made mistakes and have used those opportunities to become better reporters or columnists. And in the same way that journalists hold other segments of society accountable for their actions, you readers should hold us accountable for our actions.

If you correct us, we will print a correction notice. If you send us a letter or guest column that shows you’ve thought deeply about an issue, considered alternate viewpoints and articulated your ideas well, we will print it alongside our editorials and other columns.

It is the Opinion section’s goal to incite discussion among you and capture that discussion on our pages. If you have something to say, please say it. Part of higher education is about getting you to consider issues and controversies you wouldn’t normally think about. We can’t do it ourselves. We need you.

We need engaged, tuned-in readers to help move discussions off of our pages and into the classrooms, dorm rooms and open spaces of the Iowa State campus. If you notice an interesting angle that we have missed, tell us about it in a letter or add your comment online.

Don’t sit idly by. We want to balance any bias the Daily’s staff may have with reader commentary from you. We hope you enjoy reading our first issue of the Iowa State Daily for the fall semester and thank you in advance for providing us with your letters, your thoughts and your time.