Shut Up And Listen 221

Four Down, Ninety-Six To Go

It's Thursday night and today the final summer issue of The Gazette came out. This is the ninety-ninth volume of the paper, which is the University of Western Ontario's student newspaper and the only daily student newspaper in Canada. Well, four times a week during the school year and only four issues during the summer. For this volume, I am one of three Arts & Entertainment editors and these were my first four issues. Of course, I had a lot of training as I practically lived in the offices last year (as they like to joke). For the first two issues, I was actually flying solo as one of my fellow editors, Anna was in Sweden and the other, Dave is gone for the summer. So I did those two issues and was equal parts scared and excited.

Before I continue, I should explain exactly what my job as an A&E editor entails: basically, I hand out assignments, do assignments, contact record companies, bands and the local movie theatres, edit assignments, and do layouts for our pages. Of course, those duties are split up over three people, but I basically did them all myself for the first two issues. For the first issue, we only had two pages, but we didn't have enough content to fill it up, so I had to do an article listing upcoming concerts and a CD review. Layout was a little difficult because it was the first one I had done all by myself. I had done a few with Lori (an A&E editor from last year and now deputy editor of the paper) last year, but she helped a lot then. I mostly had questions about sizes of headlines and cutlines. But I got it done. And it felt really good.

For the second paper, I was more prepared and had no problem with filling up the pages. It only took me a few hours to do the section, actually (took twice the time the first week). For the third issue, Anna was back and I found it a little less fun because I had to work with someone else. It has nothing to do with Anna as I know her pretty well and we get along great, it was just my instinct to take control. I have a hard time playing nice with others sometimes in situations like this. Back in high school, whenever I was in a group with people, my instinct wasn't just to lead, but to do all of the work as well. But, then again, Anna does enjoy doing layout, which I'm only happy to give control of away.

For the third issue, I had also said I would write the editorial for the issue. You know on the opinions page with the cartoon? On the left there is usually some writing, well, that's the editorial. I don't know how it's done at other papers, but at The Gazette, it is first done via a discussion of the editorial board where we all sit around and talk about whatever issue front office has decided to do that time. One of the front office people (editor-in-chief, deputy editor, and managing editor) take notes of what is said, and then one of the editors writes an editorial that reflects the general consensus of what was said. Luckily, I got a topic that was fun, interesting, and everyone pretty much agreed upon. The thing about editorials, though, is that they are often heavily rewritten. They are the hardest things to write because of all the articles in the paper, they should be the most professional in nature and act as the one piece of writing that stands for the paper itself. Basically, the editorial that got printed had, oh, around four sentences that I had wrote (well, maybe a few more, I didn't actually count). I knew that would happen though, so I wasn't all pissed off or anything. In fact, Yomo (Aron Yeomanson, managing editor) said it was actually pretty well done -- especially the structure, which he kept when he changed things.

The fourth issue was probably the most difficult as strangely enough, we had too much content ready. Normally, in summer issues, it's a scramble for content, but Anna and I had done a pretty good job of planning, and had too much. Not to mention, there were problems with the network (it was down) and other concerns. But it got done too and looks pretty good.

And this was the easy stuff. Come September, it will be insane. Those first couple of weeks are often sixteen- or twenty-page papers (instead of the eight-pagers we had for each summer issue) because there are a shitload of advertisers eager to reach students. But, I'm looking forward to it.

This is the part of the column where I should give a few lessons I learned over these four issues, but I don't really have any. I learned most of the lessons I needed this past year by paying attention when I was hanging around the offices. I'm sure that will all change in September, but hey, that's what I signed on for. Should be one hell of a year.