Just a humble guy from Oregon

While I have lately been so obsessed with attaining the highest achievements known to the college publishing world, I recently found my application I submitted to become Editor of The Sentinel.

Holy hell I have changed since those humble beginnings last year. Here is just a quip from the 3-page essay I submitted:

The position of managing editor for The Sentinel becomes a more lustrous position each year. A distinguished non-daily collegiate publication rivaling that of any four-year school, the paper has morphed into a gargantuan sized fish in the vastly diminished pond of two-year schools. However, after spending four semesters as an editor on the paper that schools nationwide now compare themselves against, I have come to realize the single most inherent flaw associated with running a paper as celebrated as The Sentinel: A completely distorted viewpoint concerning the paper’s true existence.

Rather than mirror the North Idaho College experience of students in the college paper, editors are instead tailoring a paper that will please judges across the board. They focus on winning awards rather than publishing a paper that students look forward to reading! This does not benefit North Idaho College in any way – save for the writers who win awards by composing stories read only by judges.

Indeed, it should never be forbidden to yearn for recognition. I’m the first one to admit that what we do deserves plenty of acknowledgement and respect, in fact I take great pride in the awards I have received from working on The Sentinel. Where I do realize our current trend in transgression, however, is that we’re focusing more on the recognition than on the final product.

In a very major way, I feel hugely responsible for the onset of the transformation into a gaudy sized paper obsessed more with the size of photos and stories than the quality inherited within those entities. Somehow along the way, I encouraged those around me that (in lieu of a better example) quantity breeds quality; that the more pages we have in our paper, the more crap we can stuff in it and voila: An obscenely-sized college paper that NIC would want to read. But we would be wrong.

In doing just that [creating a huge paper, we slowly disintegrated the high journalistic standards set forward by earlier staffs – where hard-hitting, student-related news and features that the campus anticipated with a fervor was commonplace – and replaced it with a tabloid-esque paper obsessed with huge photos, larger-than-life layouts with controversial headlines and stories.

I realize only now how wrong I was.

In doing just that [creating a huge paper], we slowly disintegrated the high journalistic standards set forward by earlier staffs – where hard-hitting, student-related news and features that the campus anticipated with a fervor was commonplace – and replaced it with a tabloid-esque paper obsessed with huge photos, larger-than-life layouts with controversial headlines and stories.

I firmly believe that if we strive for success among our own students, attempt to attain recognition from our actual audience instead of judges, we will in turn win the greatest award of all: Respect from our scholastic peers on campus. In providing a student paper for an appreciative campus, national recognition will undoubtedly follow. Moreover, the recognition that comes when you’re not searching for it is the sweetest recognition of all.

So how funny is that? I went from an idealistic, school-oriented, humble(ish) former sports editor not worried about awards, to an Editor-in-Chief foaming at the mouth for national stardom.

Oh well, I'm almost done at NIC. So instead of worrying about making papers for awards, all I'm going to stress about now is training the future editors for 2009-2010 on the wonderous world of newspaper design.

If they become half as obsessed as I am, I see great things.