Students and faculty are encouraged to attend the Northern Star’s open forum tonight to make their voices heard on issues related to the newspaper.

All questions, comments, suggestions and constructive criticism are welcome.

The forum will be from 7 to 8 p.m. at the Holmes Student Center’s Heritage Room. Bert Simpson, associate director of University Programming and Activities, will moderate the discussion.

As a student newspaper, the editors of the Star are concerned with students’ opinions and want to do our best to serve the NIU community. In order to do so, we need to hear the concerns and interests of the student body straight from their mouths.

Last spring, Star editors were disappointed when not a single person showed up for a similar forum. It is important to attend this year’s forum because we cannot make any changes if we are not made aware of our readers’ concerns.

All questions, whether they be about staffing or content, are welcome at the forum. Concerns and constructive criticism also will be addressed, and suggestions as to how these concerns should be resolved are encouraged.

We also ask readers to let us know what parts of the paper they do like and what features they would like to see continued. Your input is important.

The Star is entirely student-run, with a staff of about 180. Many Star employees devote countless hours to the paper each week in addition to full class loads.

We look forward to seeing the Star’s readers tonight and hope that together, we can come up with some answers to readers’ questions and solutions to readers’ concerns.