By Rachel Yeates, Campus Carrier Editor-in-Cheif

Every week my mother, like her parents before her, would eagerly flip through the newspaper to read advice from “Abby” on everything from in-law etiquette to birth control. For my 12th birthday, she gave me a “Dear Abby” collection full of questions from young women.

Even when the questions were about situations I knew I’d never experience, I enjoyed reading her answers. They were entertaining and thoughtful. It was nice to know that it was someone’s job to respond with intention to the serious, the weird and everything in between.

“Make sure your paper has an advice column — everybody claims to hate ’em, but everybody seems to read ’em,” the advice columnist Dan Savage famously told the founder of Seattle’s “The Stranger.”

His words ring true today. Though critics, and even former advice columnists, have argued that there is no place for these articles in our technological age, nationally syndicated advice columns continue to pull in readers. They are featured in newspapers big and small across the world.

“The problem is that the advice column really doesn’t exist anymore,” Jeffrey Zaslow, author of Wall Street Journal’s “All that Zazz,” said over 10 years ago. “These days if you have dandruff you just Google it. No one would write a letter to a newspaper asking why it collects on your shoulders.”

These aren’t the questions people ask. Zaslow was correct in saying search engines have made information easy to access, but how do you ask Google about the gray areas? The nitty gritty details? 

Zaslow declared advice columns dead over a decade ago, and since then technology has evolved at astonishing rates. And advice columns have evolved with it. 

The landmark twin columnists Paulin Phillips and Eppie Lederer, writing under pseudonyms of Abigail Van Buren and Ann Landers, put advice columns on the map, and gave rise to online columns and those in smaller periodicals that appeal to niche audiences. (Ice fishing, anyone?)

Carrier advice columns have donned many names over the years, but this year’s incarnation is “Ask Vicki.” No niche. No strict guidelines. We just want to field as many questions from Berry students as we can.

So why the secrecy? While many columnists for larger, national papers chose to write under a pseudonym, they are still able to introduce themselves fully as well. It’s unlikely that many of the questions they receive will be from people they know personally. It’s on the asker to create that anonymity.

At a small school like Berry,  the task becomes more difficult. The column is anonymous on both ends in hopes of creating a judgment-free space to ask the uncomfortable.

Questions are sent to our  online survey host, Survey Monkey (which you can access through any of the Ask Vicki posts on our Facebook page). Our columnist sorts through the submitted questions and presents their chosen question to myself and the managing editor. We decide whether or not to give the topic the go ahead. The content of the column, however, is solely written by the columnist. Carrier staff edit the piece for grammar and libel only.

If you have any questions or criticisms of our process or content, you can reach me at campus_carrier@berry.edu. 

We at the Carrier hope that you will continue to send in questions to Vicki, as I know she looks forward to answering them.