Welcome back to campus.

The Kernel is in its 40th year as the independent student newspaper at UK, and this edition marks the start to the Kernel’s 119th year.

With that tradition behind us, the Kernel is preparing to provide campus with another year’s worth of news told from students’ perspectives.

Expect us to investigate the issues you care about. We want to write stories that get you talking (or Facebooking, or tweeting) — we aren’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

The Kernel wants to provide enterprising stories, and we have several projects already in the works.

We will document President Dr. Eli Capilouto’s first year on campus, go behind-the-scenes of different student organizations and look into issues that affect the UK campus and the greater Lexington community.

This year’s Kernel staff is determined, and we had staffers all over the country with internships this past summer. We hope our experiences have prepared us to bring news to campus in creative ways.

We strive to be an innovative paper. From photo slideshows and videos, to a recap of the day’s best tweets, we want our content to be up-to-date and something campus wants to read and look at.

We spend a lot of time in the Kernel newsroom, which is in the basement of the journalism building, but we want to meet with others on campus and give readers more voice to better serve our audience.

Watch for opportunities to meet with Kernel staffers at different places around campus, or better yet, stop by the newsroom. We’d love to meet you.

Have a story idea? Contact us. We want to know what you’re thinking.

Follow the Kernel on Twitter at @KyKernel and @KyKernelSports, and each of our staffers has a Kernel Twitter name. We are on Facebook, and we have iPhone and Android apps. We will launch an iPad app soon.

It’s a new year and a new opportunity for us to tell the stories of this campus. We hope you’ll pick up a copy of the Kernel every day and log onto 50.63.25.108 to see our content.

It’s been said that journalists write the first draft of history, and we plan to document that history as it unfolds for the 2011-12 school year.