Rice Thresher editors Sarah Knowlton, Juliana Lightsey, and Kathleen Ortiz lead a full staff meeting each Monday. This meeting occurs two days before their print edition hits stands. Photo by Sophia Fan, Rice Campanile.
For over 110 years, the Rice Thresher has served as the student voice of the Rice community. Despite the digital shift of the modern era, the team still prints 1,100 copies of a 16-page paper every week. They distribute these copies all across campus.
As co-editor-in-chief Sarah Knowlton puts it, their role is to “ask the questions that people don’t know to ask.”
In this conversation recorded in February 2026, near the end of their one-year term as the paper’s top leaders, Knowlton, co-editor-in-chief Kathleen Ortiz and managing editor Juliana Lightsey discussed how they use their platform to address critical issues that often fly under the radar.
“People who don’t like us will still come to us when they have a story that they think needs reporting. I think it just speaks to the importance of journalism in general… for a democracy, for community, all of those things.” — Juliana Lightsey, Managing Editor
They said the work done by student journalists at Rice and elsewhere can have far-reaching impact.
“No matter where you go, you will find people who are interested in journalism and the free flow of information,” Ortiz said.