When I was a senior at Wilmington High School, just north of Boston, a few friends and I spent a couple nights each month putting together the school’s official newspaper, The Wildcat News.
We’d start when school let out at 2 p.m. and work until about 11 p.m., or whenever the custodial staff began playing 1920s swing music over the loudspeaker in a desperate attempt to drive us out of the building so they could lock up for the night. Trying our best to create Wilmington High’s own version of The New York Times, we spent endless hours writing, copy-editing, arguing, photographing, developing, arguing, designing, arguing, printing and arguing. Not even our two advisors, a math teacher and a foreign language teacher, were crazy enough to spend their Friday nights this way.
But we were.
And, in retrospect, comparing the hours we sacrificed to the actual size of our school just 600 students we were pretty crazy. We never got paid, we didn’t always enjoy ourselves and we practically never received much recognition. But we did the job anyway, even with a nonexistent budget, because we were driven by visions of the final product. We enjoyed writing, we wanted to make an impact on our high school and we took pride in what we were doing.
When I entered my freshman year at Boston University in September of 1999, I found an entire staff who was just as crazy as I was. Probably crazier. I thought the epitome of stress was trying to balance schoolwork with writing three stories a week on the BU women’s basketball team. I couldn’t imagine how editors could enroll as full-time students and still work 60 grueling hours a week putting together the Free Press. It was a workload that seemed completely inconceivable and overwhelming to me.
So naturally, when I picked up the first edition of The Daily Free Press this semester, I was still in a partial state of disbelief when I saw my name at the top of the staff box next to the position of editor. And when I pick up this issue, I’m sure I’ll feel the same way. All I ever wanted to do at the Free Press was write about sports. And then, somehow, someone coerced me into becoming sports editor in the spring of 2001. And then associate editor the next fall. And now, somehow, I’ve managed to complete a full semester as editor further proof that no matter how many times I complained about the long hours, the stressful work, the sleepless nights, there was always something about the Free Press that I couldn’t walk away from.
And it’s not just me.
I’ve had the opportunity this semester to work beside a passionate and dedicated staff that has committed endless hours to The Daily Free Press. These are the editors, assistant editors, photographers, illustrators, advertising reps and writers who have sacrificed their sleep, sanity and grade point averages to carry on the Free Press tradition. They often show up to class running on two hours of sleep and 96 ounces of coffee or sometimes just the coffee. They don’t do it for the prestige from the student body (there is little). And they don’t do it for the money (there is none).
They do it because they believe in the ideals of journalism and because they have a passion for bringing the news, sports, features and photographs to the Boston University community. It’s that same passion that keeps so many Free Press staff members returning semester after semester, each time contributing more hours and more enthusiasm to the cause.
Thirty-two-and-a-half years ago, the first edition of the Free Press, founded by Charles Radin, rolled onto newsstands. And while 32 years is young by newspaper standards, each one of us still feels a sense of pride in carrying on the tradition of publishing Boston University’s only major newspaper. And we probably will continue to feel this way long after we graduate.
You, the reader, have complimented our coverage when you’ve enjoyed it, and criticized it when you’ve disagreed with it. And we, as a staff, are stronger because of your feedback. Thank you for continuing to read these pages.
And to this semester’s staff, thank you for your hard work, dedication and enthusiasm.
And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m finally going to get some sleep.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
