Editorials

Today’s paper contains the first of two “Back-to-Berkeley” pullout magazine sections. Students are arriving this week at the University of California, some coming back and some for the first time. Many new non-students also arrive at the beginning of each semester: faculty, staff, significant others, kids. Whoever you are, and wherever you came from, welcome. You’ll find a lot to read in the Planet. 

The Berkeley Daily Planet, for those of you who are reading the paper for the first time, is oddly named, for historic reasons. The name itself was originally a tribute to Superman’s hometown paper, but this year’s freshman class might not even know who Superman was. Also, we’re not exactly a daily. The paper comes out on Tuesdays (weekday edition) and Fridays (weekend edition). It is distributed every day in high-traffic locations, but not published daily. And, when we say that we’re the paper for Berkeley, we don’t just mean the 100,000-plus population of the City of Berkeley. We’re talking about Greater Berkeley: people who live in Berkeley, but also people who work in Berkeley, shop in Berkeley, go to school in Berkeley, or even just wish that they lived, worked or shopped in Berkeley. We’re read all over the world on the Internet, and we have at least one mail-order subscriber in Indiana. We believe that Berkeley is a state of mind which has expansive boundaries. 

Our East Bay coverage has extended through Albany and El Cerrito, as far north as Richmond, over to Alameda and south through Oakland to the San Leandro border. If something big is happening near you, tell the Planet about it and we’ll try to report on it. We even do occasional pieces about events and places worth traveling for: west across the bay or to other parts of northern California. Our calendar pages focus on close-by events, in greater detail and with more variety than you’ll find in metro daily entertainment pages.  

Our opinion pages are lively and unique. This year we won two first prizes in the statewide California Newspaper Publishers Association, both for our editorial pages and for our editorial cartoons (as well as four more prizes in other categories.) We are holdouts against prevailing beliefs in corporate metro dailies about what opinion pages should be. Our letters are more than just snappy soundbytes, although we get our share of those too. The longer commentaries are almost all written by local people, not by the syndicated op-ed professionals who dominate the opinion pages of many papers these days. There are big fights on our opinion pages, and even readers who don’t participate enjoy watching the byplay. Greater Berkeley people are literate, perhaps excessively so, and they put on a good show. (We don’t have a sports section as such, but watching the opinion writers go at it is a good substitute.)  

We’re independent and locally owned, not part of any corporate chain like the other papers which are distributed around here. You can find the paper free in boxes and cafes all over town, with occasional teaser deliveries in selected neighborhoods to induce readers to pick it up when they see it. We’re supported financially by our loyal advertisers, so we encourage you to patronize them, and when you do, tell them you found them in the Daily Planet.  

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