By Chantel Delulio
Lifestyle Editor
I admit it. I was an Elm hater.
What can I say? I was brash and impressionable. A whole two years younger than I am today. I think it’s safe to say that the late “aughties” were a wild time for us all. Much like the 1970s.
Okay, so maybe I don’t have an excuse, but neither does anybody else.
I had an interest in journalism and the old adage of, “Well, The Elm sucks” didn’t feel like a compelling enough reason not to do it. So I joined the staff my junior year when I got the campus-wide e-mail that they were looking for a layout editor. I had learned AdobeInDesign and a decent chunk of newspaper style from my high school journalism class. (Shout out to Mr. Kady!) If I was going to complain about gutters that ran down the whole page and pixilated screenshots of Peter Griffin taken off Google images, I figured I might as well put my money where my mouth was.
What I found, and soon enough became a part of, was a group of people working to put out a product they believed in, all the while having the odds stacked against them. There is no communications or journalism program on campus. And though the college is chock full of writers, few people are ever interested in writing for us. Not to mention the campus universally and openly despises the thing.
In my two all-too-brief years working for The Elm, I have had the incredibly good fortune to work among people who were never once deterred by any of that. They hear phrases like “drastically cut budget” and the “odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 3,720 to 1” with the resounding response of, “Never tell us the odds!”
That’s right. Your student newspaper is staffed by a bunch of Han Solos navigating an asteroid field while being pursued by Imperial TIE fighters on a weekly basis. And you thought the people who worked on the newspaper were a bunch of nerds or something.
I know that I’m biased in this respect, but The Elm that I’m leaving is not the one I snickered at for my first two years. For any underclassmen who weren’t around or any upperclassmen who’ve forgotten just go check out The Elm’s archives, this newspaper has come a long way thanks in no small part to the efforts of Editors-in-Chief Alisha George (2009-2010) and Alice Horner (2010-2011).
The Elm is far from perfect. Maybe there’s a misspelling in a headline or an incorrect photo credit or maybe you personally don’t care for the content. That’s fine. Nobody’s asking you to like it because you don’t have to. But this is a publication that has worked hard to earn respect. So before you look down your nose at us, why not pick up an issue and really read it? Or better yet, try walking a mile in our shoes.
Take it from a reformed hater, you’ll be proven wrong every time.
May 6, 2011
Volume LXXXI Issue 25