Dear Readers,
In Tuesday’s edition of The Daily Orange, we published a Letter to the Editor titled “Former SU student questions Rosales’ candidacy for SA” from someone claiming to be Timothy Keller, a 2011 SU alumnus. We later discovered and confirmed there is no record of Keller’s attendance at Syracuse University.

The Daily Orange fell victim to a scam and unknowingly published a letter from a fictional reader. The letter has since been removed from The Daily Orange’s website. We felt we had an obligation to inform our readers of this incident.

The Opinions section of The Daily Orange represents an opportunity for Syracuse students, faculty, staff and community members to voice their opinions and concerns about campus issues. The fact that an individual took advantage of this open forum and took away an opportunity for a credible SU community member to voice his or her concerns is something The Daily Orange does not take lightly. The point of the Opinions section is to incite and promote discussion, and this cannot be done when someone abuses the process by creating a false identity.

Letters to the Editor are sent to the editorial editor via email to be published in the next day’s paper. As a result of this incident, we will require that submissions also include a phone number at which the author can be reached. This will provide another method of indentifying those who submit Letters to the Editor. We decided to make this process more structured to ensure the quality of our content and that readers don’t have to question the validity of these letters.

We hope our readers will continue to use the Opinions section to express their views and concerns in an appropriate manner.
Sincerely,

Casey Fabris
Editor in Chief

Maddy Berner
Managing Editor

Anna Hodge
Editorial Editor

Published on November 14, 2013 at 1:49 am