Sometimes, I forget that people actually read The Stute.
I mean, obviously, people read The Stute. We wouldn’t be making a paper every week if people didn’t. Students wouldn’t be writing articles or opinion columns or even requesting advertisements to be printed if they didn’t think The Stute was a large enough platform in which it was worthwhile to share their opinions and present updates and news with the Stevens community.
But honestly, I forget how many people read The Stute. We’re not the Harvard Crimson or anything, but a large portion of our student body, administrators, faculty, staff, parents back in California, and just random people on the internet pick us up on a weekly basis. It’s heartwarming. The quest to increase our readership gives me motivation to skip classes and write several pieces a week; the feeling of contributing my time to something greater than myself is a huge reason why I’ve been a part of this organization for over 3 years now.
If I think back to my early days, basically no one read The Stute. When I told friends I was in The Stute, they would roll their eyes and say, “Who even reads that?” We would only cover campus events, like academic lectures or RSO events, and basically just reported on things that people already knew about. If we made a mistake in the print, it would be on us to notice and issue a correction because no one else would notice.
Over the past few years, that’s definitely changed. Besides the fact that we’re slightly gutsier now, as a news organization should be, we’ve shifted focus from the topics that people already know to the topics that people don’t know yet and need to know. Even the opinion section has changed to the extent that we have students passionate about a certain subject and chose to utilize us as their platform to spread their message.
But anyway, since I’m perpetually of the mindset that not enough people read The Stute, when people actually do read us and I hear some criticisms about us, I’m usually pretty caught off guard. My first thought is about whether it was a mistake or a conscious decision. How I react to criticism differs a lot based on the answer to that question.
If someone is upset with us because we made a mistake, I actually take it
really personally. I know I shouldn’t, but if it’s something that I could have prevented, I tell myself I’ll never let it happen again (even though that would be impossible). If someone is upset regarding one of our policies, I try to sit down with them and understand whether their concern is valid — should we be updating our policies? Otherwise, I try to communicate our policies in detail and why they are the way they are to the person since that’s my responsibility as Editor-in-Chief.
The benefit of being in The Stute is that I’ve built up a network of informants throughout the years that will tell me everything I need to know and things I probably don’t need to know. But with that comes the hardest part of my job: when I hear about criticisms of us through the grapevine.
Like I mentioned before, everyone is completely entitled to their opinions about us. But my main concern is that if you really want us to change, why not just tell us when you have an issue? Sometimes we make mistakes and we do always strive to make our product better. But if you don’t tell us at all and just criticize us to other people behind our backs, well, we’ll just find out anyway. But it’s never the full story, so we probably don’t even make the changes you want. I am not a mind reader! If you have a problem with my organization, the members in my organization, or just me… please come and talk to me about it.
Anyway, my opinion about what we publish remains unchanged. Whatever makes it in — the good, bad, perfected, or unfinished — is a true representation of The Stute and the school at that time. Those of you who know, know — we’re doing 20-hour weeks for a job we don’t even get paid for. I feel disappointed in us when we put in the wrong title for an article and vice versa, but I also try to relax because I know at the end of the day we’re just students. The fact that we can do this every week without literally pulling our hair out is a miracle.
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