Column: This team embraces fear, especially on Tuesdays

Thanks for reading the DTH on our first day back. I can already tell you it’s going to be a great year — today we’re launching Swerve, a new section covering student life, arts and entertainment; our app is now available in the App Store and on Google Play; and we’ve just started accepting op-eds.

We’ve also had a change that will be obvious to anyone who passes a DTH box one week from today: This year, The Daily Tar Heel will not publish a physical newspaper on Tuesdays.

Like many publications, our financial situation isn’t great right now. This is only one of the ways we’re trying to make it better.

But that doesn’t mean we’re taking a night off or going home early on Monday nights. Everything you would have found in the print paper will be online on Tuesdays, along with stories we’re not able to tell in print — stories with major video, audio or interactive components. Stories we can’t wait for you to see.

Thanks to the internet, The Daily Tar Heel hasn’t been “daily” for a long time — we’re much faster than that. We work around the clock to bring you breaking news as it happens, whether it’s 2 p.m. on a Wednesday or 3 a.m. on a Saturday.

I’ve asked editors to bring their A-game on Monday nights, and they’ve transitioned faster than I could have hoped from concern — which is, after all, a natural response to change — to excitement.

A new sign on my desk says “Embrace fear.” We’re all in. We’re ready. We want to keep getting better, so tell us what you think about our work. My email, editor@dailytarheel.com, is pretty easy to remember, and I’d love to hear from you.

I also strongly recommend signing up for our daily newsletter, downloading our app and following us on Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Finally, we’d like to ask for your support in one more way, if you’re able to provide it. The DTH is an independent, nonprofit organization that accepts no money from the University. Every day, we think about how we can best help our readers, and now we hope you’ll consider helping us.

If you click the donate button on the front page of our website, you can choose to support a specific desk or a specific goal, such as sports reporters’ travel to away games or better technology for our photo and video staff.

You can also decide to simply support the DTH’s teaching mission. My favorite selling point when recruiting DTH staffers (we’re accepting applications, by the way) is that nothing else you do in college will so regularly make you think about ethics, about right and wrong.

So thanks for making us better people, thanks for reading and thanks for helping us sustain the joy and chaos of a college newsroom. This community makes what we do possible, and we’re grateful every day.