This is What We Do

The few, equipped with the sufficient abundance of both hubris and hutzpah, sacrifice the good life of the fret-free college student in favor of hours and days in a collegiate newsroom. The few who do too damn much for too damn little with only the hopes of standing out a nose more to an employer come judgement day. The few who listen to countless sources whose disdain for their newspaper often spills out in equal portion to the perspective they were sought to share in the first place.

It's my job to make that few do their job. And sometimes to make it harder.

Fact is, it's not easy to do what they do. Stress begets panic, panic begets hilarity, and boy, do they panic. What is easy is picking the parts of the day that err on the comedic side of tragedy and poking fun at them, or finding the heroism, or the frustration. That's what I do here, mostly at the expense of everyone but myself.

Any given deadline day, ads dance from page to page, stories come in late or just don't bother, and countless digital prayers in the form of text messages and e-mails go unanswered.

It's not a lazy day's work. It's not for the faint of heart. It steals hours upon hours of sleep. It ages you.

But something comes out of all that anguish. Herding a staff of so many intellectuals into the intimate confines of an editor's desk and dropping immense pressure on the group creates a trove of clever, angry and sometimes unabashedly honest nuggets that are beyond duplication. It's a twice-a-week experience that begs to be chronicled.

And so it shall be.