July 31, 2004 - 4:23 a.m.
The time is coming when I will have to write a message to the next editor in chief of The State News. It will be a long memo, perhaps with some funny observations in it — I don’t like to get too bogged down when I write to other people — but mostly with the lessons I have learned. The mistakes I have made. The things he or she would be wise not to repeat. I am not ready to write that memo yet, nor am I ready to consider my life after this little newspaper that has taught me so much.
I’m sitting on a beige couch, in a dingy little apartment on a street that’s really a parking lot, somewhere in the northwest corner of East Lansing. This place has been my home for 50 weeks now — almost a full year. The carpet has a Faygo Redpop stain in the middle of it and underneath my bare feet, I can feel crumbs lodged in between the threads of the floor. There are crumpled up paper towels on the coffee table (one is stuffed inside a glass that formerly held milk), along with a plate covered with crumbs from pizza rolls eaten four days ago. A blanket is thrown over the love seat, I’m sitting in an ergonomically dreadful position, hunched over this keyboard, pecking away as though my life depended on it, trying to eep out a coherent thought onto a blank screen that has been waiting for prose I have not recently been able to supply. Tonight will change that, I imagine.
Surrounding me are applications from intern hopefuls. They are of varying levels — some people clearly more than ready for the rigors of a daily newspaper, others nowhere near there. One applicant supplied a television script that refers to the same person as being both 12 years old and 9 years old in the same paragraph. It’s been rough reading. Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised. There’s a guy who has reported from Capitol Hill, a woman who wrote an excellent column on “American Idol” and another who can set a pretty good scene in about 20 words. I want to do it right this time. Hiring, that is. I’ve done it right before, but I feel that you are remembered by what you bring to the newspaper, and in the case of this job, I bring internships to the newspaper. My job is to find talent and bring it to The State News, and the decisions I make now will affect the future in a big way. That’s so important. By the time I’m done with my term of office, 26 staff members will have been selected by me, just as I was selected by a woman named Mary Sell. I wonder, sometimes, if she knew she was hiring a future editor in chief. I wonder who among my hires will hold this job some day. It’s a fun thought.
The one thing I’ve learned very quickly in this role is how lonely it can be. Socially, not many people want to call their boss and hang out after work. I understand that and I don’t expect to be anyone’s best friend. I have acquaintances, and even a friend or two at work, but none so close as those I’ve made elsewhere in previous endeavors. The real loneliness comes professionally, however. At this level of management, there’s no one to complain to. Nowhere to vent. No one to make decisions for me. So I spend a lot of time after hours in the newsroom, with only a desk lamp on, writing long, drawn out essays about the things that must be soon decided. Or I go home, get disgusted that Nick at Nite is showing a “Full House” marathon, turn off the TV in favor of my laptop, and begin to write at 4 a.m. (much like I’m doing now). I hope that in the middle of spilling all that copy onto the page, I might just work out the problem; that explaining it on paper might help spark in me an epiphany and a solution to the issue at hand. And I hope that, because some days, it’s all I’ve got. I can’t take my concerns to many co-workers, because very often my concerns are about them, or someone with whom they work closely. When I mess up, and I do, I cannot spend too much time regretting — it’s mend the fences and move. I constantly feel behind schedule, like something else has to be done today but damned if I can remember what it is. Almost every page of my planner has something scribbled on it, and I’ve realized that before December, I didn’t even need a planner. Everything fit in my head. Now, if it’s not written down, I don’t get it done, and people get mad, and I fall further behind schedule. It will be August before the weekend is through and I still feel somewhere in mid-July in terms of what I had hoped to accomplish so far.
But the job is good. The job is very good. Professors in bars talk to me about the university’s current state of affairs. Students ask a lot of questions about why we do what we do. Every now and then an angry reader calls and while that’s never a fun or enjoyable situation, I always hang up having learned a little more about what to say for the next call, and wishing I could just skip ahead to the fifth angry call on the same topic, so at lest then I’d know what to say. And I’m surrounded by talent. Raw, raw talent. These people are the best college journalists of our day and soon the best professional journalists of our day. Some might win a Pulitzer or other related honor, and I can at the very least say that one day long ago, we traded witty barbs over a cubicle half-wall, or at the very most call them up and congratulate them, as we’ll likely still be friends. I cannot help, truly, but to feel a sense of overwhelming pride in the newsroom and the people who make the paper happen every day. It’s hard to look around the newsroom and not feel a thrill. Something about seeing people all with phones wedged into their necks while they feverishly type quotes into an iMac makes me smile.
So when I have big decisions coming up, and I’ve paced the halls a million times, and played out different scenarios in my head, and sat down and typed a stream of consciousness at 4 a.m., I can still go to bed happy, and knowing full well that I will not, when I leave my post, be remembered by my errant moments, but by how I made people feel at work, and how the experience during my year went. I laugh every day at work, and hard, too. Not just a chuckle, but a full, guttural, from the belly guffaw. I think every day at work, too, about the world around us, about people I work with and where they’ll end up, and a score of other things. If my co-workers feel anything like what I feel for the newspaper (a combination of magic, awe and protectiveness, in case you’re curious) then I think I will, at last, have succeeded.
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