My high school in Mountain View, Calif. had one of those fearful weeks in mid-March 2001 that seemed to ripple through high schools regularly during the early 2000s. Someone called in a bomb threat on Monday, forcing us out of our classes and onto the school’s front lawn. Later that day, a few students got in a fight in the front parking lot with a group from our cross-town rival high school (keep in mind, this was suburban San Francisco – not exactly the gang capital of the world) and the group that lost threatened to shoot up the school. The next day, a student received an eerie threat in his locker: “Beware the Ides of March” – March 15, 2001, that Thursday.
Most students decided to stay home that Thursday, rationally fearful that something truly bad could happen. But a few of us crazy newspaper dorks – with that weird adrenaline rush journalists get when big news breaks – went to school eagerly, skipping out of class to take pictures of empty parking lots, darting to administrators during recess for updates on the situation and spending hours writing and redesigning the Mountain View High School Oracle’s front page, which should have been done much earlier that week.
Fast forward six months. It was Sept. 11, 2001 and I was a mere five days into college, still a sad and confused freshman who happened to be 3,000 miles away from home and not entirely sure what he’d gotten himself into. My first instinct when tragedy struck? Run to the newspaper office. I had known I wanted to get involved but hadn’t had the courage to actually walk through the doors before that tragic day. What I found was 20 other people trying to deal with the day’s terrible events in the same way I wanted to – finding the news (in our case, BU’s reaction to the attacks) and getting it out to our readers as quickly as possible.
Fast forward a year and two months. It was just a normal Sunday evening – there was no big news. But Sunday evenings mean something entirely different when you work at The Daily Free Press. Everyone in the office was probably pretty tired, still recovering from God knows what they did Saturday night. But the music was off – a rarity in the office – and all I could hear was the sound of fingers tapping keyboards; all I could see was a group of college students focusing on computer screens and working hard (and for free) at a time when most of Boston University was winding down its weekend and relaxing.
Fast forward another year. It was midday on Friday, Oct. 31, 2003. BU’s Board of Trustees had just announced that they’d officially decided against installing Daniel Goldin as the school’s ninth president and that then-Chancellor John Silber, the man who had shaped the university for more than 30 years, was stepping down from the board and ending his official involvement at the school. After one of the most tiring weeks of the semester for the Free Press staff – most people had spent afternoons calling trustees, evenings writing stories and next mornings thinking about how we could beat that pesky Boston Globe – 20 of us spent the afternoon and evening reporting, writing, editing, designing, debating and getting out a special Saturday edition with some of the most important news in BU history.
One editor had to push back dinner plans with his girlfriend and her parents (this place is not good for relationships); others had to cancel plans with friends (it’s not that great for friends or roommates either – I’ve gone long stretches without seeing mine this semester); and all of us had to shorten our plans that night for – that’s right – Halloween. It was exhausting, but it was one of the most memorable days of my Free Press career – one of those times you just sit back and smile because a bunch of other people have that same craziness you have.
Fast forward to Tuesday night. As I write this, it is my final night as an editor at The Daily Free Press, and I can’t help but say I’m pretty sad about it. I’ll miss all the passion, all the learning and all the downright insanity that goes into doing something as crazy as putting out a daily newspaper while trying to hold down a full course load and do all the other things that go into college, as dozens of Free Press staffers do every semester.
This semester, we’ve had long arguments about affirmative action and gay marriage, debated at length where stories should run and why and eagerly awaited the next day’s paper so we could take a look and be proud of all that hard work. We hope you’ve enjoyed it too. Indeed, you’ve criticized and, at times, expressed your disappointment in our product, and we’ve appreciated the feedback and tried to learn from our mistakes. But we hope we’ve gone at least part of the way toward putting your college experiences into words and pictures and capturing some of the most important events, people and stories of the spring.
As I sit back tonight, I can’t help but smile again. Numerous people are hard at work trying to put together a newspaper for one final time this year. It may be our biggest issue of the semester, but my more than 250 issues worth of work on the paper tell me it would be the same any other night. And I’ll miss that intensity most.
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.
