Welcome to another school year, and a new year of the Emerald’s Pulse. Don’t worry, I won’t yap at you here about some burning social issue. Instead, I want to introduce this brand-new section you’re holding.
For those not familiar with the Emerald, the paper introduced Pulse as a special section on Fridays in spring 1999, designed to cover arts and entertainment.
Since then, it has changed a little, moving to Thursdays, alternately growing and shrinking in size, and finally being blended back into the regular paper on Thursdays.
In the planning stages for this year’s paper, there was a sense that we weren’t giving our readers a strong enough Pulse.
Some topics, like books and food, only received coverage on rare occasion. And readers told us they wanted more concert and movie reviews, in addition to our usual coverage.

In order to make room for everything that we want to cover and to try to accommodate things readers would like, we have decided to split our Pulse in two and introduce a new section this year.
We’ve called the new section “Pulse Relax,” it will appear on Tuesdays, and the idea is to make the section similar to a metropolitan daily newspaper’s “Living” or “Style” section. In this section, you can expect to read stories about restaurants, travel, fashion, books, cooking, recreation and home decor.
We’ve also hired an advice columnist, whose column will appear beginning Oct. 1. An advice columnist needs perplexing situations to sort out, so e-mail your questions and concerns to [email protected], or mail them to:
Advice
P.O. Box 3159
Eugene, Ore., 97403.

The regular Pulse section, now called “Pulse Excite,” covering performing arts, fine arts, movies and music, will still be featured on Thursdays, and as always, we welcome your input on what we can do to make our entertainment coverage even better.
But for now, we’re especially interested in what you would like to read about in this new section. It’s an evolving experiment, so give us feedback; comments can be sent to the Pulse editor at [email protected] or directly to me.
Most of all, take the time every Tuesday to let your Pulse Relax.