Maybe that’s not the best way to wish Cindi Scoppe well as she takes the helm of the Post and Courier‘s editorial pages, but it sounds right to me. No one ever greeted me that way when I was an EPE, but of course they should have.

Anyway, she deserves it. The best possible person is now heading the only functioning editorial board in the state of South Carolina, and that’s good for the paper, and good for all of us.

Here are her thoughts on her new job. An excerpt:

Now, back to the main topic: The values that are most important to me and us involve how we live together in society and how we find solutions to the problems that most of us face regardless of our politics.

That starts with focusing on improving our communities and state rather than winning prizes or appealing to people who already agree with us. We’re happy to win prizes, but the real prize is guiding conversations and decisions in a positive direction.

It means focusing on what’s best for our communities rather than us personally. A small example: I hate the law that says you can’t touch your phone while you’re driving, but I wrote editorials advocating for it (and yes, I obey it), because it would save lives with only minor inconvenience.

We aim to be pragmatic and strategic in what we write about and what we don’t. We’re not worried about offending readers or lawmakers, but we’re not going to do that absent a good reason; we pick our battles….

We believe there’s rarely a single right approach to any problem, and we support consensus and compromise rather than an all-or-nothing answer. We’re not going to reject solutions that match our values perfectly, but we’ll rarely condemn a solution that gives us only part of what we want.

In other words, Cindi is continuing the mission. She could have written the same words to describe our approach back in the day at The State. The place where we used to do that is now rubble. So it’s great that the Post and Courier still provides her with a platform from which she can carry on.

Congratulations to Cindi, and especially to the Post and Courier for being smart enough to see she’s the one for the job.

This is going to be good…