Texas. The Lone Star State – home of cowboys, oil barons and the Alamo.

A state so big that one family, by the name of King, owns a ranch with more land than the state of Rhode Island. Even Hollywood was impressed enough to make the movie, “Giant,” with Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean, about it.

This year the Iowa State Daily staff got a unique look at the state of Texas, through the input and expertise of journalists from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Since September, the Daily and the Greenlee School of Journalism and Mass Communication have hosted five staff members from the Star-Telegram. Grant money was obtained as part of the Newspaper in Residence Program, which is funded through the Knight Foundation, a journalism organization based in Miami.

With each Star-Telegram visitor came a different area of expertise and new ideas for the pages of the Daily.

In September, J.R. Labbe, senior editorial writer for the Star-Telegram, came in time for football games and Iowa’s fall weather. Labbe worked primarily with the opinion section of the paper, critiquing columnists and sitting in on editorial board meetings.

This was an area of the paper which had never been worked with much before. Opinion writing is not an area of journalism taught in many schools, including Iowa State. The Daily’s opinion page was operating under the same guidelines it had always operated under, and Labbe was the first outside resource giving input about it.

In November, Matt Pinkney and Gene Zipperlen arrived as the second group of visitors from Fort Worth. As executive design director for features and graphics, Pinkney was a great visual resource for the Daily’s graphics, photo and design editors. Zipperlen also shared his expertise with the Daily’s newly formed copy desk, working with copy editors on editing techniques, AP style and English usage.

Javier Aldape, publisher of the Spanish-language newspaper La Estrella, arrived in February, full of knowledge about every aspect of the newspaper industry. Aldape introduced us to new ideas about covering minority issues and recognizing our role in the ISU community.

Following closely on Aldape’s heels came Jeff Claassen, the computer-assisted reporting specialist, in early March. Claassen, who left last Friday, introduced a new area of reporting emphasizing the use of data, records and research in stories. He met with several of the Daily’s reporters, giving them ideas and plans for more investigative and in-depth stories.

With each of the visitors have come changes in the way the Daily staff sees its work and its product. These changes may not have been big enough that our readers noticed them, but they have improved the quality of the paper since we began last August.

They have challenged us to perform and pushed us to expect more from ourselves in order to serve our readers and community better.

And the critiques continue to come from Fort Worth, watching and commenting on the work we do, seeing how much the Daily staff has grown in its work through the year.

They’re looking at the big picture – we couldn’t expect anything less from Texas.

Andrea Hauser is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Edgewood. She is editor in chief of the Daily.