As a former editor for The Lowell, I eagerly look forward to reading your paper to keep up on how things are going back in high school. I'm a '99 graduate and now a journalist in Beijing, China. I started off writing opinion and news pieces at the Lowell, and reading your insights is a privilege that always connects to home. So I was troubled when I got the paper last month and saw your "In The News Today," about Senior Ice Cream Night.

It's a little piece, merely an ad at the side of the page, but I'd like to encourage you to rethink your reasons for printing this, particularly from the perspective of any of your fellow students who may be overweight; have eating disorders or have ever been on the edge of having one; or have general self-image issues about their bodies.

I wasn't even going to your Ice Cream Night and reading it made me squirm. I'm not sure exactly what you were aiming for in this piece, but if it was to be pure sarcasm, maybe it didn't quite go far enough to make that totally clear -- and even if it had, it might still have had this effect. If that wasn't the point, could you really think of nothing better?

I think it's easy to forget, when you're sitting in the Journ room at 11 pm on production night, stressed out and mentally all over the place, just how much influence what you write can have on your peers who read your paper on Friday morning. They may realize it, they may not. But either way, you help frame the debate about things in school and you help frame their thinking about important issues. Whether or not you intend it, your article will leave them some sense of how to act, react, or just think about an issue.

On my own Senior Ice Cream Night, I watched several people I knew head straight for the bathroom afterwards to stick two fingers down their throats. They didn't need any encouragement from the Lowell or anyone else, but if The Lowell had helped foster or further the culture that made them feel that that was necessary, just so that its writers could say something witty on the front page and make people laugh, I think I would have been ashamed about that.

My point isn't that we shouldn't be writing about and talking about problems like this one -- we absolutely should. It's that doing so in this way isn't helpful, and isn't necessary, and makes me worry that as editors and reporters, you don't fully grasp the influence and importance of the job you get to do.

That may sound preachy, though that's not my aim. Preachy or not, it's something I'd like to know that you've considered. You may decide I'm completely wrong. That's okay, too.

But I hope you do think about what your reasons were for printing this, and whether or not you'd ultimately stand by them.

Sincerely,

Lauren Keane, Class of '99