Today’s Crimson White bears almost no resemblance to the Crimson White Victor Luckerson inherited two years ago. He led a team of the most talented, dedicated and loyal people I can imagine and with them, took a college newspaper and made it a service organization.

That team laid the groundwork for a new set of possibilities that all of us, together, get to explore over the next year. We can be a great newspaper, a great news organization and a great network.

But this isn’t a column about what we’ve accomplished. This is a column about what we have yet to accomplish — not just as a newspaper, but as a community.

Going forward, The Crimson White will continue to provide a service to everyone on this campus, in this city and in this state. And that brings us to the fun part. You all have a voice, both together and individually. You should use our service to share it because your voice is worth sharing.

Tweet at us @TheCrimsonWhite. Visit thecrimsonwhite.com to submit your pictures and videos of what’s important to you on MyCW. We also welcome letters to the editor. When we start CW Projects in the fall, take part in them. Email our editors with story ideas or submit them on the CW App when it becomes available in August. We’ll share it all with our network of 14,000 Twitter followers, 7,000 Facebook fans, 8,000 daily web viewers and thousands of print readers.

We’ll also continue to ask the tough questions that need to be asked. Every day, news reporters will ask what people in our community are doing and why. Culture reporters will ask what makes us “Tuscaloosa,” or what makes us “The University of Alabama,” and sports reporters will delve into coverage, analysis and discussion about our athletes facing and overcoming adversity.

If we can accomplish all this, The Crimson White will be providing you the service you deserve. I hope you’ll participate in it, enjoy it and find some answers for your own questions.

But even if we do all this, we’ve still only run half the race.

Social scientists often study a set of social problems called “collective action” problems. These problems arise when everybody in a group, country or society thinks that somebody else, somewhere else will take initiative and work to solve a problem. If somebody else is going to do the work, they often think, “Why should I make an effort of my own?”

The problem, of course, is that none of the work gets done and none of the issues ever actually get addressed.

The University, Tuscaloosa and the state of Alabama have a lot of problems. The Board of Trustees has, so far, asked only one student to help with the search for a new University president. Our politicians in Montgomery seem to favor “dealing” — to put it lightly — with immigration rather than addressing Alabama’s broken budget system. Tornado recovery is facing criticism, and a third of voters in a thecrimsonwhite.com poll say they think it’s moving too slowly.

These, and others we face, are collective action problems. We all think somebody somewhere else will ask the questions and put in the time and dedication to solve them. The issues don’t get fixed because few people ever actually do.

The sense of community we all felt after April 27, 2011 should give us hope, though. It solved our collective action problem. When @TheCrimsonWhite tweeted that a relief group ran out of toilet paper for storm victims, people who saw the message didn’t think somebody else would take care of the problem. Because they cared, they took initiative themselves, and truckloads of toilet paper arrived hours later.

This scenario played out in many ways for greeks, Honors College students, SGA leaders and in-state and out-of-state students alike. Everyone who took part in the relief effort saw the effect they had, and it made us love our community.

This is the service The Crimson White can provide. We can show you, by working as journalists, that if you decide to take initiative and do something yourself, you can have an effect and solve a problem. So, I’ll leave you with a challenge and a promise: Make news.

If you go out on the Quad and protest HB56, we’ll cover it. If you work within SGA to organize a day of service for Tuscaloosa, we’ll be there. If you and your “Face” make it onto national TV, we’ll write about how it happened.

In other words, use your voice and The Crimson White is at your service. I hope you enjoy the paper in 2012-13.