The newspaper editorial is a sacred institution. It is supposed to offer insight on issues, events and problems relevant to the community and serve as a watchdog against institutions of power.

Unfortunately, several of our editorials, including one published Wednesday on Midnight Madness, have been based on faulty facts, providing nothing but misinformation and misrepresentation. This is unacceptable, considering that the purpose of our opinions page is to facilitate meaningful dialogue among the members of the campus community and beyond.

Yesterday’s apology is something that we, as the editorial board of The Daily Illini, should have never had to do, but it is a position that we have put ourselves in numerous times throughout the last couple of semesters. For this reason, The Daily Illini Editorial Board has decided to stop publishing editorials until further notice.

It is the standard of most respectable professional and college newspapers to run editorials regularly and frequently in its opinions pages. But such standards presuppose a definite utility for fulfilling the newspapers’ mission: providing fair, truthful, balanced, important, interesting and necessary information to the community they serve. Our editorials do not meet this goal and to continue publishing the editorials the way they have been would be a disservice to our readers.

This is why we have decided to close shop. This is not an easy decision for us, and we do not take it lightly.

But simply put, The Daily Illini Editorial Board must change the way it chooses editorial board topics, the way the editorials are written and the way they are edited and fact checked. There are a number of options we are exploring in order to bring you something that we can be proud of, and within a couple of weeks, we hope to be back and better than ever. We fervently want to bring you the editorials that you, an informed and educated group of media consumers, deserve. To do otherwise is unacceptable.

Jack Mabley, one of our most distinguished alumni, once reflected on his time here. He said, “I was proudest that in my 365 days as editor we never had to run a correction or skinback or apology, nor were we asked to.”

It is in this spirit, both of the long legacy of this paper and the importance of the editorial as an institution, that we do our duty to our readers, admit our mistakes and restore the credibility of this paper.

However, we cannot hope to restore our reader’s faith in us without hearing from them. Write to us, tell us what you think about The Daily Illini, don’t pull any punches. We cannot fix this without you.