To our readers, we are incredibly thankful and appreciative for every copy you pick up.
Whether you’re at Starbucks picking up your morning cup of coffee before class, or working on a paper during the three hour gap between classes, reading the paper can be so much more valuable than just your much-needed caffeine spike.
Our staff list on page 10 doesn’t have a lot of names there. Other than our advisor, but we’re all students here. Together, we produce our weekly paper. Just what all does that consist of, though?
Our first step to realizing our paper is to plan ahead. I’m not convinced anyone is psychic at the Clarion, so seeing the future can be difficult. As a weekly paper, we can’t publish the absolutely most current, breaking news, all the time. However, you may have noticed that sometimes, that’s still the case.
We have an extremely broad group of people at the Clarion. Last week, we highlighted in our April Fools edition how we can use humor to better our environment and ourselves as we learn. This week, I want to bring in some of the seriousness that there is to putting out our weekly paper.
Brainstorming doesn’t just happen. To brainstorm effectively, the editors are responsible for being worldly enough that we can reasonably foresee and create focus stories to grab your attention, while also giving you something genuinely thought out and accurate.
A lot of brainstorming deals with critiquing and reflecting on our past editions. Every monday, we pick up the paper from the printers and immediately critique ourselves through our departments.
Do you ever look at 30,000 other students and ask yourselves, “What do these students want, need and have to know?” We do, pretty much every day of the week. Even in our nightmares.
We assign stories as far out as we can. We don’t, and won’t publish just anything. What we want is to create a paper that demonstrates the ways we make use of this opportunity at Sinclair to pursue our goals.
Did we do a good job advertising? Are our stories engaging, accurate, and representative of our community? Did we miss an error? Are the margins correct? Did we give enough opportunities for growth to our staff? Those are honestly just a very, incredibly small sample of questions that go through our minds.
We’re doing this every week. We’re also doing this every break. Our core team doesn’t consist of much more than a handful of people. These people do extraordinary amounts of work and dedicate incredible amounts of time to our workplace.
This, by no means, detracts from the outstanding work from the smaller cogs of the Clarion. Without everyone, our gears wouldn’t turn, and you all wouldn’t bother turning a page.
Everyone has a very specific and important contribution to make. From the creative designs, the photos you see in the paper, the intensive research and numerous interviews and points of contact our reporters make each week, the hours of editing text to make sure the point comes across clearly, the actual designing of the paper itself as it is laid out to print, the hours of advertising, creating flyers, calls taken and made — the list goes on and we do it all to make a thin piece of newsprint.
It can be a fun job. We’re the ones that go to Sinclair events, cover Sinclair Talks, cheer on the teams and feature players. We feature staff and students with stories to tell. We don’t do it for the money, we do it for you.
Students and readers may not understand, but the Clarion is only around because of you all. We have you in our minds first when we report on something. That’s something that’s quite rare in journalism today. We bring the news to you, fair, unbiased and with you in mind.
What a foreign concept, right? When you read our paper, it means so much to us, but it means even more to your community.
When you pick a Clarion up during your day or break, you’re saying you care about what your community has to say. You want in on those conversations. You want to listen, you want to participate and you want to be involved. Even just reading the paper is a huge factor in keeping up on campus with your Sinclair community.
The reason most of us at the Clarion started working here is because we wanted to be a part of the community at Sinclair. However, when we don’t receive support or constructive criticism, we feel it’s a one-way street while we’re aiming for a mutual relationship.
Barton Kleen
Managing Editor