Three and a half years ago, as a shy and awkward frosh, I screwed up my courage, walked into the Journal House and asked for a reporting assignment. I was sent on the spot to a student-led protest with no idea what I was doing. With shaking hands and a wavering voice, I managed to scrawl some details and quotations from the protest organizer into my brand-new drugstore notepad before scurrying back to the relative security of the Journal House to write up the story. The news editor hemmed, hawed and rearranged words in the finished product for a few minutes, then turned to me and pronounced it “pretty good.” I picked up the paper that Tuesday to find my journalistic debut on the front page. I still have no idea how that happened. It definitely had less to do with talent and more to do with circumstance.
I could say the same of this: this crazy year that finds me trying–in vain–to encapsulate in 600 words a job I once swore to myself I’d never take on. Fresh out of Frosh Week, I looked at the Journal staff and wondered what possessed them to structure their academic and social lives around what most students seemed to view as a vehicle for the in-class crossword.
I don’t think I appreciated, at the time, the indispensable shit-disturbing and record-keeping role the Journal plays on campus. Years from now, a student just as burnt out as I am as I write may flip through this volume of the Journal–a significant chunk of the written history of this year at Queen’s–and gain a perspective on Homecoming, campus development or University istration in 2005-06 that only a fellow student could provide. The Journal is for that future student just as much as for current readers, and that’s a mandate the staff here have tried hard to fulfill.
As a frosh, I also didn’t yet realize that my four years working here would be the greatest and most addictive learning experience of my life.
I learned that most criticism is not as valid as its initial sting would suggest. Sometimes you deserve it, but more often the fact that your readers and interview subjects are incensed simply means you’re doing your job right: you’re printing relevant content, and it’s getting read.
I learned that bureaucracy is the greatest inhibitor of strong journalism, whether you encounter it as a reporter seeking interviews or as an editor seeking to keep your publication as autonomous as possible.
Most of all, I learned just how much of a privilege, a responsibility and a challenge it is to be a journalist. I may never write an article again, but I know that 20 years from now, I’ll draw on a skill I never thought I had and I’ll realize I learned it here.
These observations have generally come not from my own work, but from that of those around me. Through their bridge-burning questions, sleepless press nights and failed exams for the sake of this publication, my fellow editors taught me what it really means to have guts and vision, to work hard, and to make sacrifices for a greater cause.
My co-editor, Jen, stands out here as the brains and the backbone of this year’s paper, and Gabe, the Journal’s inadequately titled “istrative assistant,” as its heart.
I can’t say that I’ve done more for the paper this year than to edit carefully, work with others in good faith, and help my staff where I could. The 25-odd other people who work for peanuts here are the real drivers of this publication, to the point that at the end of my year at the helm, I don’t feel comfortable taking credit for much. I’m grateful for them, and I owe them all, immensely.
Any errors or omissions, as they say, are entirely my own.
Emily Sangster still doesn’t know how any of this happened.
In all honesty, I hope you find the following to be the least interesting article you’ve read in the Journal this year.
If you do find what I’ve got to say interesting in comparison to the rest of the paper this year, then I’m willing to wager you haven’t read the Journal much. So take some time to peruse this issue’s Rewind section, and you’ll likely conclude this was one of the most newsworthy years Queen’s University has been through in recent history—but for all the wrong reasons. It has been good time to be a reporter (there was barely a dull moment) but a bad time to be a Queen’s student.
In the first few weeks of the school year, the University set a precedent with its decision to return nearly $1 million in donations to the School of Business from alumnus David Radler, who pled guilty to embezzling tens of millions from his companies. By the time the last few weeks of the year rolled around, it was all but certain that tuition is going up, but hey, at least you can finally console yourself with a hot cup of Starbucks from the caf.
In the months between those first and last few weeks, no group on campus had a monopoly on childish behaviour: of faculty, undergraduate and graduate students all shared equally in the petty name-calling, sometimes in the pages of the Journal’s letters to the editors section, which, frankly, made editing the section all the more entertaining. There’s a disheartening number of people on campus who believe freedom of expression extends only to their opinions to the exclusion of all dissenting ones.
What’s strange is that despite everything I’ve described above, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my experience at Queen’s, and I have the Journal and its incredible staff to thank for that.
Ever since Aberdeen Street, I’ve often thought it’d be great if I never heard the phrase “Queen’s students are …” again. Mostly because I know there’s no way to adequately describe in one sentence the Queen’s students who routinely sacrifice their personal and academic lives to produce this newspaper. So I’ll just say this to the talented staff of the 133rd volume of the Journal: It’s been a privilege to share a masthead with you.
One of the Journal’s two overarching goals is to provide journalistic experience to its staff, and I sincerely hope our staff feels we’ve succeeded in that this year. An editor from the Edmonton Journal recently called the Journal “an unofficial journalism school” and in that vein, a Journal staffer will hold the Queen’s Alumni Review internship for the fourth year running this summer, and the only interns without journalism school experience at the Kingston Whig-Standard and the Kitchener-Waterloo Record this summer will be Journal staff.
As much as the Journal strives to give students journalistic experience, there’s a lot more to journalism than good grammar and note-taking. Dedication, empathy and a solid sense of right and wrong are important qualities for any decent journalist to have, and for those reasons the Journal is invaluably lucky to have Gabriele King to show us how it’s done. Gabe, I feel fortunate to count you as a mentor and a friend.
The second part of the Journal’s mandate is to inform students about issues that are important to them, and I hope you, the students, felt engaged and perhaps even challenged by the past 41 issues. I also want to thank you for voting “yes” to contributing another $1.50 of your hard-earned money to the Journal next year during last fall’s referendum. While the Journal strives each year to spend your contributions wisely, it’s not part of the Journal’s mandate to make money, which we happened to do this year. We don’t take your for granted, and your contributions will enable us to upgrade our equipment and expand the paper’s content to better serve you while staying in the black in future years. I also have the sad privilege of being part of the last volume of the Journal that will be produced in the Journal House at 272 Earl St. This address has been home to the Journal for 15 years, and while it’s sad to see an important part of the institution of the Journal go, it gives me great satisfaction to leave in the Journal in the capable hands of next year’s editors who I have no doubt will continue the Journal’s 133 years of exceptional student journalism.
Jennifer MacMillan would never have written this if it weren’t for the of Emily Sangster
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be ed, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to journal_editors@ams.queensu.ca.