This week marks the third week The Stute is publishing without our computers. If you haven’t been a member of our organization before, let me explain to you how a newsroom operates.
We meet every Tuesday to discuss issues we want to investigate and articles that need to be written. Our writers have a couple of days at most to research the issue, contact and interview the related stakeholders, and write an article about the topic for Thursday night, when we create the paper using Adobe software and submit it to our publisher.
Now, as of this Thursday, no one is really using computers. Assignments are discussed and distributed verbally or through email, Slack message, etc. Writers handle these things using their personal devices. However, on Thursdays, the e-board and a few poor souls that volunteer their time meet up and create the paper.
Creating the paper entails: creating a design for each of the 12 pages based on the articles that come in, contacting writers that have not submitted their articles, working with new writers to polish articles, contacting people for photos, quotes, advertisements, and puzzles, editing every single article that is written for facts (to the best of our ability) and grammar, placing articles into Adobe InDesign and moving them around next to pictures and playing with the text boxes (think making a really pretty 12 page Word doc with 20 different articles inside), making sure that once articles are edited they are replaced into the print templates, making sure articles are being posted on our website with pictures and on Facebook, and sending out our weekly subscription to our mailing list.
It takes literally hours for so many people to make this paper, and that’s when we have our computers with our software, years of templates, and stock photos. We do this every single week. It takes double the time and effort to use our own devices, with small computer screens and weaker processing power, and to scramble around campus taking miscellaneous pictures of people and places.
After four years of being a student here, no one can convince me that Stevens cares about students. Maybe future students and growth initiatives, but not current students. Like I said in my last editorial, people’s main concerns are themselves. My life and my friends’ lives are being inconvenienced, so here I am complaining about newspaper problems in the newspaper for all of Stevens to know. As a student, I’ve heard “we’re doing all we can” so many times that upon hearing it I just roll my eyes and have learned to expect nothing from anyone.
The mail system is down, there is no access to storage networks, and computers and printers across campus are still not working. A whole building is delayed and hundreds of Senior Design students are not having classes that they paid for. Even professors understand that this is absurd and are holding classes outdoors, in Babbio Garage, even fraternity houses… is this real? Sure, the ransomware attack made it “impossible” for people to work and set construction back, but how long are we going to use that excuse for everything that is still broken?
Real student-centricity is not just listening to students’ concerns in order to temporarily appease them and then continue to ignore their problems as usual. It means really making students’ problems your own and consulting students when making decisions that affect them — like not going back on promises made to students (mandated mental health modules) or forcing huge changes down our throats (eliminating academic break).
The reason why we see so many students without hope and just making memes about how the school doesn’t care about them is that no one is really showing them otherwise. The problem lies in Stevens’ culture. Administrators can probably count the number of students they know personally on one hand. A majority of students are apathetic and just want to get their degree and get out of here, leaving the remaining few that are fixated on really important things, such as creating communities and improving the school, fighting an uphill battle.
Anyway, The Stute has always been a part of the latter group. This week, we have articles on the ransomware attack, construction delays, and salaries of administrators. Whether or not we get access to our computers back, and whether or not you read us, use us for crafts, or to soak up a spill, we will still publish the content people need to know every week. Even if one day we get censored by the SGA or someone higher, we’ll publish online and on social media. We’ll keep at it and will deliver news to the Stevens community as long as Stevens has something to report on — which, at Stevens, you know there always will be.
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