This isn’t your high school paper

 

During my senior year in high school, I was one of the sports editors of the campus paper. There were four of us; we had an issue only about every two months, and we typically only had four to five pages to fill.

Now nearly three months into my gig as a sports editor at the Daily Trojan, I can look back at those days and laugh. Instead of four editors, there are just two. Instead of bi-monthly issues, our paper is on the racks every Monday through Friday. Sports typically has up to four pages each day.

What I’m trying to say is I essentially do the equivalent of what four people achieved in two months at my high school paper in a single day, two to three days a week (my co-editor Hailey and I switch off days in the office).

The absurdity of that accomplishment is never lost on me every time I walk out of the office with a finished sports section and place the proofs in my editor-in-chief’s box.

Somehow though, I feel more stable and in control at the Daily Trojan, despite the hectic day-to-day operations of producing a daily newspaper — the scramble to fill space, the stress that comes with writers not turning in stories, the 8 p.m. basketball games that brush right up against deadline, the devastating spelling or grammar errors that aren’t caught and printed for the world to see.

Yet, I would take this job over my high school paper in a heartbeat.

Producing four to five pages every two months was somehow a bigger struggle than having just a day to do it. Writers wouldn’t turn articles in on time, despite having weeks to come up with a draft. And despite having several months, it always seemed like it was a race against the clock for us editors to find photos, finish captions and update stories. The fact that none of us really knew how to use InDesign didn’t help either. Somewhere in my inbox are piles of concerned emails from the newspaper moderator basically wondering what the hell is going on with the sports section. Those are fun to go back and read from time to time.

The biggest plus to working at an independent campus paper, though, is exactly that — the independence. I love the freedom to be objective and criticize when necessary. My high school paper was strictly censored by the administration. Every story had a positive spin. When a team played poorly or negative news broke about an athlete, we simply wouldn’t run a story. It was as much public relations as it was journalism.

By no means am I disparaging my high school paper — I worked with good people, and it was an excellent learning experience. I probably wouldn’t be here today if it hadn’t been for the (rough) introduction to newspaper production.

Wednesday night, I left the office around 11:30 p.m., having finished a five-page sports section that included a story I had written on the fly during production, another that came in late and a last-second photo addition. In all, there were seven stories and five photos.

Of course, what I thought about as I walked out with proofs in hand was that I accomplished all of that in six and half hours. If you had told me that that was possible as a high school senior, I would have straight up laughed.