An Editor Goes Off The Record

Sweat. Blood. Newsprint. All play key roles when it comes to putting out any newspaper, and a high school publication is no exception.

As editor-in-chief of the Rogers Record, I oversaw four page editors, the business manager and a number of reporters, kept in touch with our printer and ran countless little errands all with the intent of getting the paper out every two weeks, never without glitches or hair-pulling frustrations.

Here are some excerpts from a journal I kept while editor:

Feb. 1: Meeting deadlines is never easy. There are always a number of stories that come in late and we have a small staff, so every story is important. They all have to be edited for spelling and grammar, and new newspaper regulations seem to pop up every issue.

Feb. 8: I hate weeks we are due to come out. Every morning I wake up with a stomachache, thinking about all the work we still have to do in order to meet our deadline. Right now, none of the new reporters have completed their stories, due three days ago.

Feb. 9: We are further along than I thought! News just needs to be approved by the teacher; Features needs a few minor tweaks; put stories on Sports and it’s done. And Entertainment, where it looked like the reporters weren’t going to get done, may actually have too many stories — ah… the sound of that (too many stories).

Feb. 10: We got the paper to the printer! I only had to stay in the room half the school day, but it arrived at Garland Printing on time. It looked pretty good, too. The teacher says we are now at the point we should have been at the beginning of the school year.

Of course, things never run smoothly.

Feb. 16: We goofed! In our story about George Nethercutt visiting Rogers, he is a senator, not a congressman. We’d been informed about this mistake, and the news editor fixed it in the headline but didn’t realize it was in the story, too. When I checked, I saw that she had fixed it in the headline and assumed she’d fixed the story. Oops!

Feb. 24: The teacher tried to help the sports editor with her page today, and wound up deleting a crucial number of changes. So we stayed later than expected, scrambling to recover her work and learning a valuable lesson: Save changes before letting the advisor get his hooks into all that hard work.

March 10: Man I’m frustrated! Not only were a great number of stories late today, but once we finally got all stories done and all the pages set up and approved (after six hours of nonstop work), the printer would not print. I think we should make it so that everybody who turns in a story late has to stay as long as the editor has to - until the paper is finished - and see how much their slacking off affects the rest of production.

March 11: The teacher says he stayed late after school, and he couldn’t get the printer to print, either. At least I know it wasn’t just me.

March 12: It was the stupid clip art. Apparently the computer wouldn’t let us size a piece of artwork to fit into a certain area. That was all that was the matter. It’s true what they say: The little things will kill you.

I’ve been criticized in the past for being too easy on the reporters and that’s probably why no one works. I really don’t feel the argument is valid, because these are hardly realistic working conditions. If, in real life, someone failed continually to get their work done, they would be fired. Plus these people are my friends, or people I would like to have as friends. (In a world like this, a guy needs every friend he can get.) Furthermore, I don’t want to be too pushy. When the bell rings and class is over and we all walk into the halls, I am me, they are them and the world reverts to its natural state.

It is such a relief to have passed the editor’s torch. It’s a job I don’t think I ever want to do again. A section editor, maybe. But to be in charge of everything, no way.

Still, I feel proud of the many improvements we made to the Rogers Record this year, most noticeably our flag. In recent years, that part of the paper showing our name was getting boring. The first thing we did last fall was make it more visually appealing. We changed the type font and added a skull-and-crossbones. Talk about fate: Rogers mascot is a Pirate, and our skull has Pirate written across its hat. Even if I bombed every other part of my job as editor, I will look back proudly on that change.