(79) Weird things happen when I sleep. My wife says I steal all the covers (lies, I'm convinced. She throws them my direction). And I've noted some weird dreams, etc.Last night, I dreamed that I was back in my college newspaper office. I recently visited said location, but to do recruiting for my study-abroad journalism program. And in my dream, I was offered the chance to return their as the student newspaper Editor-in-Chief. Which would (a) be strange because I don't attend the school any longer, (b) be more strange because I would take a fairly severe salary cut, (c) be even more strange because I'll have experience (and soon a degree) that would separate me significantly from a college-age crowd and (d) be a twisted way of reliving some of my favorite memories.
I suppose the place has been on my mind because of my recent visit there. When I was editor in chief of the paper, I did work with some exceptionally talented people. Some of what I was proud of my last year on staff, when I served as Editor-in-Chief, are below. Some seem humble now that I've worked in mainstream journalism three years. But for my campus, journalism (and I mean real journalism) was still a very new thing.
(1) "There's Something About Mary"--this was an opinion piece written by a talented Catholic journalist on how Catholics were at times unfairly treated on campus. Huge response. She illustrated that our paper wasn't going to pull punches.
(2) The Urban Youth Impact spread--it was a mixture of some fabulous photography from our photo editor and a feature length profile on a charity in town that worked with inner-city kids. It really dealt with some of the difficulties, obstacles the organization faced.
(3) The Eating Disorder spread--this was a shared victory between one of our writers who wrote a straight forward article on the proliferation of eating disorders on campus while we had another writer share a first-person piece on her struggle with it. Very powerful stuff.
(4) The expose on central administration and the piece on the gay security guard--these are the two I wrote. And man did I put in some leg work for them. I was down at the courthouse for the lawsuit with the gay security guard (who was fired, ps) and the expose on central admin was a three part series on, essentially, why the organization was messed up. I'm still proud of my work on those.
(5) Gorbachev--the dude came near campus to speak. I'm still proud that I got one of our up-and-coming writers and our photo editor into the press conference. I'm fairly sure it was a first for our campus.
And I would link the article, but the archives are gone. Thus erasing all the work I did. Alas.
1 comment:
My fingerprints as well as yours good buddy. Ah well, I guess that goes to show, we couldn't best the Institution in the end. Four years of basements, tap dancing floors, Tmatt and getting called into the Dean's office to hear "Good job Greg and Sal but you really shouldn't have published this..." all erased with the click of a button. It's funny, a professor once told me that the administration would be glad when we graduated because we knew where all the skeltons and bodies were buried. In the end though they made us vanish almost as completely as Jimmy Hoffa. (Apparently the Beacon did not have any articles until 2008...)
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