Rolling into the rear GUC parking lot last Saturday night in a 12-seater van with The Flor-Ala staff, I’d had about five hours of sleep in the previous two nights. My friends call me an ‘80-year-old man’ for my sleeping habits, so I should’ve been feeling a lot worse than I was.

But I felt energized. We had just returned from the Southeast Journalism Conference in Martin, Tenn. with a ton of ideas (and some awards) for the paper-ideas involving multimedia projects and our online social media presence.

I’m particularly excited about producing some video content and trying to get some broadcast journalism and film and digital media production students involved, but I’m also a little nervous.

I’m nervous The Flor-Ala won’t get any response from students on our new ideas and projects, and we won’t have any way to know how we’re doing. I definitely don’t want to approach this with the old “If you build it, they will come” mentality.

What I do want is to be told I suck … when it’s warranted. Likewise, I want to be told I don’t suck.

We’ve tried to ramp up our online presence this year, and it’s helped us to see a little more student response. But if you ask me, the response isn’t enough.

The Flor-Ala isn’t just our paper. It’s yours. It’s the paper for the UNA community. We’ve got over 7,000 students at UNA and 968 followers on Twitter and 1,157 fans on Facebook. I am so totally not a math person, but I think that means we’re about 6,000 short on both sites.

That’s not to mention anyone and everyone who has even the faintest connection to UNA.

I understand not everyone has time to write a letter to the editor, but everyone has time to tweet. It’s only 140 characters, after all. So follow @UNAFlorAla and tweet us that we’re twits or rant to us on Facebook, but tell us why. And don’t just say we’re awesome either-tell us why you think so.

In other words, provide us with real feedback we can use. We’ll listen to you and do the best we can-I promise.

The Flor-Ala staff knows there are some students on campus who have taken issue with the paper this semester. We’d really like to know why so we can fix the problems, but we can’t unless we get feedback on our work and the new ideas we’re going to try in the very near future.

So, take this column as my (@TheFlorAlex) official invitation for you to insult me and my work-as long as you tell me why you feel that way.

To contact Alex, call 256-765-4364 or you can follow him on Twitter at @TheFlorAlex.