Probably biased, as the Editor-In-Chief of a school newspaper, but still! Hear me out.
The weekend before last, one of the most eventful days of the semester for student organizations took place: Accepted Students Weekend. But did you see the “Tuition on the rise” vandalism?
God, when I first heard about it I was so shocked. It’s true, tuition is on the rise. I hate it as much as the vandal, but geez, how could someone actually do that? And the night before Accepted Students Day? I would feel too bad about all the work that the workers and staff put in the past few weeks to make the school look beautiful.
Just for a few minutes, I felt guilty and responsible for it. My column from two issues ago titled “A University on the Rise” ended up becoming my most-read work in my entire Stute career, receiving over 1,000 reads between Facebook and our website. To be honest, it wasn’t supposed to be angry or hostile. It started getting shared and people were adding comments about their own negative experiences; it wasn’t my intention to stir the pot. I really hope that I wasn’t the inspiration because I did get my inspiration from the mecca of all complaints, /r/stevens.
It’s during situations like these that I remember how meaningful and unique my position as Editor-In-Chief of the school newspaper really is. Every week, I ruminate over what I want to write just because people do read The Stute these days. It makes me want to write something that can be useful and valuable, whether it be explaining my experiences or someone else’s. (Also, I want to do our $26,000 semesterly budget justice.)
That was the other event during that weekend! The “big beautiful budget meeting,” a.k.a. the semesterly budget meeting. For those of you only casually involved in clubs, this meeting is essentially the one day in the semester where the SGA decides whether or not your club will get money for the next semester.
The Stute is almost always asked why we need to publish and why our budget is so big. If we really need that much money and if we actually use our equipment. That happened this time too. We were requesting a new computer since we only have about three that work and we were met with personal attacks like, “Do you really need this kind of specs?” and, “Are you sure this isn’t going to be your personal gaming computer?”
I feel like this kind of interrogation was not only unwarranted but also unprofessional. Just because you don’t read The Stute and don’t care about Stevens doesn’t mean the general student body doesn’t deserve that resource.
All of us work for The Stute for free. I, and all of the other e-board members, spend a minimum of 10 hours per week at the office, planning and researching articles, writing, designing the paper, and publishing them online. There are also 10 to 15 staff writers who contribute on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.
Creating content on a weekly production cycle, working with others, managing a team: all of these are invaluable skills that no classes at Stevens teach. I can say I got my first internship exclusively because of all the experiences I had in The Stute. To work for a newspaper is just like working for a small business. We need the best technology to be efficient and save every minute we can — not because we want to be fancy.
In order to be a platform for student voices, and in order to be well-read and taken seriously, our staff works really hard every week, week after week, all semester long. We do make mistakes and, sometimes, criticisms of us are valid. Sometimes we publish things knowing people are going to be upset with us. But it wouldn’t be fair to only publish the nice stuff.
It’s imperative to have student journalists who can hold other students, organizations, faculty, administrators, and even ourselves accountable for what they’re doing (or not doing). Without the media, people would just get away with whatever they want and no one would know about it. No one would know about the University Towers, how certain academic departments are performing, or President Farvardin’s salary. Sometimes we are childish and we are gossipy, but that doesn’t make the entire publication worthless. If anything, it just shows how much we love working to create the paper, that we like to keep it true to the spirit of the organization and just always keep it real.
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