Welcome to the 131st year of the Register Forum! We are delighted to be printing our newspapers and delivering them to the hands of our community again. Exclusively producing online editions was disappointing in countless ways, but it allowed us to create a more inclusive process where, rather than approaching a room full of junior and senior editors with a pitch, new contributors could easily send a private chat in a zoom meeting. In fact, we created four new positions for the 2021-2022 year due to increased interest, including News and Sports Media Editors.

This year, one of our goals is to memorialize the long history of the Register Forum by creating an online archive of every edition since the paper’s first publication in 1891. As one of the oldest continually-run high school newspapers in the country, we have the unique opportunity to trace the roots of the paper, the high school, and Cambridge itself. This history not only offers an interesting look into students’ interests over the years, but also shows which parts of Cambridge culture have changed, and which have stayed consistent. By organizing editions and making them easily accessible from our website, we can ensure that the perspectives before us are not forgotten. We hope they inspire current journalists to strive toward capturing the best possible representation of our present.

In past “welcome” editorials, our predecessors have fallen into a cycle of addressing a problem which, despite their good intentions, has yet to be sufficiently addressed at the Register Forum: diversity. CRLS has a diverse student population, however the Register Forum editorial teams have historically not matched this makeup. A former editorial staff prompted a harmful miscommunication between our organization and the Black Student Union, blatantly ignoring their voices. The disrespect shown toward the BSU was shocking, counterproductive, and not representative of the 2021-2022 editorial staff. This year, we will work to make the paper a place for all students to freely express their opinions, and collaborate to produce a publication which reflects our student body while advocating for the changes it sees necessary.

We will be visiting freshman homerooms, reaching out to a range of clubs — including the BSU — and understanding that at every opportunity to foster inclusivity, we must honestly address our own flaws. Our paper will be pursuing the difficult topics in our school that the student body cares about, such as the various inequalities which plague the school. It is our priority to elevate the voices of those affected by such topics; we will not settle for any less. These hard-hitting stories require courage, but we are not afraid to uncover the information that CRLS deserves to know. We will be pushing for more investigative reporting in order to get to the core of the issues that matter to students. This is not a responsibility that we take lightly, because we know a commitment to the truth is crucial to good journalism. Yet, as our motto “Reflecting CRLS” expresses, it is our job to report on the school, faculty, and students with honesty.

If you are a freshman, or if this is the first article of ours you’ve ever read, we want to meet you, listen to your ideas, and support you. You don’t have to have any experience in journalism or writing of any kind to join. Additionally, you can truly write about anything that interests you, whether that be art, sports, politics, the local Cambridge community, food, humor, or a club at CRLS. If writing isn’t your thing, we would love to have more artists and photographers. You could also join the copyediting team or help out with our podcasts! We will be spending a lot of time working and hanging out in room 3401 after school, so we invite anyone reading this to come and visit us. Follow us on Instagram (@registerforum) to stay updated on our monthly NewsStorms and new editions. We could not be more excited to be back in the building and printing again, let’s have a great year!