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Have you seen the My.UCLA forums lately?

They’ve really got something for everyone. Students use them to buy and sell textbooks, look for roommates, debate who the next president should be and argue over the situation in the Middle East.

Some use the chatrooms to ask other UCLA students important questions like: “What do the squirrels think of the quarter system?” and “Is it OK for a guy to have hairs on his back?”

The forums caught my attention when another Daily Bruin staffer e-mailed me to tell me some people had posted some not-so-nice stuff about our newspaper.

He wasn’t kidding. They seemed to hate us.

A few who posted got really angry when we wrote an editorial opposing the attempt to recall Gov. Davis. Others went on about how we hire people based on their political views, screening out any conservatives. One even wrote a sarcastic “Ode to the Daily Bruin.” It was long – and scathing.

On one level, these posts amuse me. In a different way, I’m disturbed.

Why? Because I fear these guys may be right? That there really is a massive left-wing conspiracy infiltrating The Bruin I just don’t know about?

No. I’ve worked at The Bruin for three years – now I’m the editor of it – and many of the people I work with are some of my closest friends in the world. I know for certain we don’t hire or fire people because of their political views and that our journalistic ethics are actually pretty high.

What bothers me is that those posting on forums – and hundreds and hundreds of others on campus – have serious misconceptions about The Bruin. Our job here is to communicate – yet somewhere, the communication is badly breaking down.

If The Bruin remains a mystery to the students at UCLA – if people don’t know where we got our facts, or how we came to the conclusions we did in our editorials – they’ll stop believing what we write all together. That’s not good for us.

You might be saying: “Well, editor, what are you going to do about it?”

Actually, we’re doing – and have been doing – quite a bit to keep in better touch with our readers.

When we redesigned the paper in spring 2002, we started putting writers’ e-mail addresses below their stories. We also put phone numbers for each of our writing departments on the front page. The idea was that if we made it easy for people to contact us, our communication with our readers would increase, and, thus, we’d be less mysterious.

We recently created an e-mail address for those who think they see a mistake in The Bruin: corrections@media.ucla.edu. We are considering hiring a staffer whose job it would be to critique The Bruin and write about readers’ concerns with our content (see Viewpoint, p. 2). The Viewpoint editor and I agree we need to start printing more letters to the editor.

We’re opening the flood gates for criticism.

That’s because we take your concerns seriously. But The Bruin’s relationship with its readers cannot improve if you don’t also take us seriously.

If you’re going to chime in, a well- thought-out argument about how we missed important questions in an article we published does a lot more good than flying off the handle and calling us a bunch of idiots.

Sometimes I’m astounded at how little people know about The Bruin, or the people who run it, before they feel free to rip us apart.

Once, a person wrote in to me and called me Eva Braun, incorrectly guessing my gender based on my name. (Would this person have called me Adolf Hitler if my name was Joe or Steve? I wonder.)

The point is, if the person – whose gender I don’t know either – was really concerned about what I wrote in an article, I would have been open to having a conversation about it. He or she would not only have learned that I am, indeed, a man, but would have also learned I’m not much of a Nazi and that if I screwed something up, I screwed up without intending to hurt anyone.

More importantly, I might have improved as a journalist – or at least seen the article I wrote from a different viewpoint. But as it were, neither me nor the reader came to a better understanding about the other person.

The point: We’ll do our best for you, but it won’t do much good if you don’t also do your best for us.

And forum guys, whoever you are – my guess is that beneath the sarcasm and conspiracy theories, you have some serious concerns about this newspaper, so if you want to get in contact with me, I can be reached at editor@media.ucla.edu. We can go have coffee or something.

Rayburn is the 2003-2004 editor in chief.