“Consider, for instance, the enormous proportions our little print may assume … thus we place ourselves before a public which is not, we hope, too critical, a public  from whose hands we have every reason to expect sympathy, encouragement, cooperation.”

With those words, 100 years ago this month, the Old Gold & Black was officially launched in Wake County, N.C., on the campus of what was then Wake Forest College.

Ten decades have come and gone since the first issue of this newspaper was published on Jan. 15, 1916. In that time, this university has grown dramatically, changed in name and location and risen to be nationally recognized as one of the finest institutions of higher education in the United States.

Through all of it, the OGB has continued to serve students and the greater Wake Forest community with a commodity critical to the success of any community — news.

Today, we want to recommit ourselves to that ever-important mission.

In a changing world, with immense challenges both here at home and abroad, and with a critically important election already underway, there may be no more important time for our community to be engaged with the daily events unfolding around the world.

But even Wake Forest, a place with so many talented and driven young people, faces a number of significant challenges ranging from racial inequality on campus to the continued growth and expansion of the university.

At this time of change, we at the Old Gold & Black will continue to do our best to bring the most important stories to the students of this university in a way that informs and enlightens.

In celebrating our centennial, we’ve launched a completely redesigned website at wfuogb.com that we know will help us to better serve the Wake Forest community. This new website will be the home for our social media feeds, online versions of our weekly print issue and all of our digital content and will allow us to explore new ways or sharing information through video, audio and different forms of data visualization that are reshaping the news industry on a daily basis. We hope students will take full advantage of it.

We are students and we are not perfect, nor do we claim to be. But for the last 100 years we have worked hard to  try to get it right — something we look forward to doing for the next 100 years to come.