It's 3 a.m. on a Wednesday and Katrina Tentor, editor in chief of Concordiensis, has only a few hours left before this week's edition goes to press.
Staring at one last blank page, she asks herself the same question countless editors have asked, “How am I going to fill this?”
Faced with a readership
that has high expectations, student writers who can be unreliable, and limited exposure to what is considered correct journalism, Katrina deals with the obstacles week after week because of her unconditional dedication.
“I am proud to say that I'm
the editor in chief of a paper that has been the main political impact on this campus since 1877,” she says, adding, “Sometimes I am more proud than other weeks. Concordy is not merely my extracurricular activity. It consumes every minute of my life on this campus in one way or another.”
Her staff consists of a handful of students who, she says, strive to “make the most
professional paper with the resources we have.” Unfortunately, all too often the campus community forgets about the obstacles the staff faces on a regular basis. On each Tuesday evening, for example, editors wait for their often unreliable writers to e-mail their articles. By the end of the night, Katrina simply tries “to cover bits and pieces instead of one major thing.”
Concordiensis is basically a do-it-yourself operation. It operates independently of the administration and of student activities, except for its budget. Its student writers “float in and out of the office all the time,” as the editor puts it. The College offers no journalism courses or training, and the newspaper's only advisor is a full-time faculty member in the Classics Department.
In most cases, writers are introduced to Concordiensis by word of mouth from current writers, or editors will “drag in their friends.” Turnover is high, and the paper constantly depends upon new writers with fresh motivation, backed by a new string of cartoonists, editors, and layout editors behind them. Fine lines have to be walked. As Katrina notes, “You don't want people to quit, so while the staff tries to adhere to standards of
professionalism, it also must placate crucially-needed but inexperienced writers.”
Still, despite all the handicaps, the students who produce Concordiensis recognize that they have an important role
in depicting the political,
cultural, and social changes on campus.
But on this Wednesday
morning, there is the practical problem of an empty page.
So Katrina looks around the office, desperately searching for that last page filler. Finally she decides to create an advertisement on her own, an insider's page understandable to herself and maybe a handful of others. The spontaneous creativity such as this, which stems from these late hours, does preserve the paper's
collegiate flair after all.