OPINION: Welcome to our new Opinion section

Dear Readers,

As we promised six weeks ago, this first Sunday of 2025 we are unveiling a new and improved Opinion section. Sundays will mark a larger section that will include more editorials, op-eds, columns and some syndicated content. Thanks to the continued interest and interaction from our readers, which we greatly appreciate, our volume of letters to the editor has increased, so we are planning to run in a slimmer daily opinion section with our SpeakUps!, op-eds and columns.

As you can see at the top of this page, we have a new color-coded system to distinguish the different types of content that can be found in this section. This comes in response to some reader confusion about what was our opinion, what was the opinion of leading voices in op-eds, the opinion of our columnists and those of syndicated columnists. Hopefully, this key, which will run at the top of each section, will make this clearer to readers.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we are introducing our new Community Council. We have enlisted seven distinguished New Mexico leaders from a variety of backgrounds, industries, experience and education who have generously consented to give us their time, voices and sometimes even their friends, in the form of expert columns we will run on Sundays in this section.

We will meet monthly to discuss and debate various issues of significant impact on the community, and they will then alternate op-eds, expanding on certain issues in which they have had been personally or professionally involved. We decided to spend the council’s first month focusing on the critical issues of crime and economic development. Our first piece is here in this section by Joanne Fine, a former vice president of United Way, whose biographical information will be in Opinion Editor Jeff Tucker’s piece introducing the council members.

We are a living, breathing institution that aims to change with the times and reflect New Mexico’s debates and issues in these pages. To that end, we welcome feedback as we evolve this section — and the paper overall!

Sincerely,

William P. Lang

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Publisher of the Albuquerque Journal