Daily columnists are funny things. This is not to say that they’re necessarily funny people — too often they’re not — just that they are, in essence, the paradoxes of page six.

See, for the most part, columnists have never spent more than five minutes in the newsroom. They usually don’t know what their editors look like, how the paper gets put together or even why exactly they were chosen for the job.

Yet, each quarter, they are the faces of The Daily. If they bore their readers, then The Daily is boring; if they anger them, then The Daily is maddening; if they’re racist, we’re racist; if they’re stupid, we’re stupid; if they’re long-winded and stubborn, then we are too. If they’re ugly, we’re ugly; and if they’re beautiful — well, if they’re beautiful I guess we’re still pretty damn unattractive. But you get the idea.

And that puts us in an awful bind. On the basis of two 550-word sample columns, three sample ideas and a short bio (due in the Forum box on the third floor of Norris by 4 p.m. on June 2), we pick five rank outsiders to make or break the entire paper for a good 10 weeks. Sometimes, all we can do is close our eyes and point and hope against hope that maybe one of the new crop is a Mike Royko or Maureen Dowd and that the rest won’t screw everything to all hell before the quarter’s over.

That’s a lot of power and a lot of trust to bestow on total strangers. But when everything clicks, when the columnist captures the imagination of an entire community and imbues a campus with the words and ideas that stay with them through class and lunch and into the night — it’s all worthwhile. So we keep our fingers crossed and we roll the dice for one more throw.

A week from today, we will begin the process of building the five-name rotation that will engage those of us returning in the fall and that will greet the class of 2004. And we want one of those names to be yours, if you keep the following in mind:

pi#149; You will be a reporter. Your columns will reflect your opinions, but they will be opinions based on conversations with the people involved and thorough research of the facts. If you already know everything you need to know about your topic before writing, there’s a good chance that most other students do as well.

pi#149; You should focus on the issues, and the issues should be news. If you know for a fact that most people are aware of the topic you have chosen, tell them something new, or don’t bother telling them anything at all.

pi#149; If you ever bother not telling them anything at all, you should have somewhere else to go after we fire you.

pi#149; You will never compare anyone to Matt Hale unless they are, in fact, the self-avowed white-supremacist leader of a militant racist gang. It makes for a poor argument, and it’s usually wrong.

pi#149; Barring an Arthur Andersen shooting spree at Old Orchard, the words “Abercrombie,” “society” and “consultant” will never appear in your column. The words “multicultural” and “diversity” are allowable if you honestly can’t come up with a better way to make your point.

pi#149; We know we should go into Chicago more. Mention it once, but don’t make it a whole column.

pi#149; You should either have a cast-iron stomach and a hardhat within reach or a bottomless bottle of Jim Beam by your bedside. The more certain you are that nobody will disagree with what you write, the more they will. And if I am wrong and they don’t disagree with a single thing you have ever written, then they will condemn you for being dull and recommend six forms of summary execution in detail. It’s rough. Trust me.

pi#149; And, most importantly, every one of these rules could fly right out the window at any given moment.

We want the best and, more importantly, so does this campus. And if you have what it takes, then we have a page with your name on it.

Your picture, too.