Welcome to the new Daily.

For 130 years, we’ve delivered you the most important and timely information about what’s going on at Northwestern and in Evanston, every weekday. Entering our 131st year, we have no intention of changing that. But we do have some changes planned to make the experience more fulfilling and enjoyable for you.

Most importantly, we’re putting a renewed focus on investigative and analytical reporting this fall. While newspapers report on what happens, they also have the responsibility to be proactive in independently investigating issues that affect their readers. This obligation holds our leaders accountable. It is the most important function we have.

So today we unveil a new regular feature of The Daily Northwestern: “In Focus.” These articles will take in-depth looks at issues that impact the NU community, even if they have not necessarily been in the headlines lately.

Today, we look at a new financial aid program which may indicate a change of direction in NU’s financial aid office and ultimately attract a more socioeconomically diverse student body to the school. Tomorrow, we’ll examine some (unannounced) tweaks to NU’s alcohol policy and whether they will be effective at fighting binge drinking on campus. Later this week, we’ll analyze Big Ten expansion, the new U.S. News and World Report rankings and the latest on town-gown relations.

The goal is to run at least one “In Focus” story every day, so The Daily will always be your source to learn about issues that impact you.

In addition to this important change, we’ve revamped our coverage of events, announcements and general goings-on. Instead of searching through our pages to find recaps and previews, you will have a constant place to go for what happened last night and what is happening tonight. That place will be “On Campus” for campus news and “Around Town” for city news.

And we’ve spruced up our Forum page, in an attempt to better engage our readers. True to its name, this section of the paper views itself as a forum for student discussion. So you’ll see new, different, engaging content that will demand you get involved.

Finally, you’ll notice that we just look a little spiffier today. We’ve redesigned our newspaper and our website (www.dailynorthwestern.com) to make our display cleaner and more accessible.

Our website, in particular, has gotten a complete makeover. We’ve added a “Top News” section which will be the go-to place for the latest Northwestern and Evanston happenings. We’ve added more categorization and related article links to our posts, so you will be able to easily peruse background on a given issue. And we’ve brought back our popular “recent comments” module, a PDF version of our newspaper and an improved search option.

As always, we want to hear your opinion on all of these changes. If you have a suggestion or just want to rant, please send me an e-mail at [email protected]. I respond almost immediately to every reader e-mail I receive.

Until then, we will continue to work tirelessly to bring you the most important and interesting news. Stay tuned.

Editor-in-chief Brian Rosenthal is a Medill senior. He can be reached at [email protected]