Times New Roman, 12 point font. Bolded black and underlined, they always stood out against the rest of my writing.
The yellow bubbles and the mounting number of comments always stared back at me as I watched a cursor zip across my Google Doc at light speed.
The words and advice of my former journalism adviser lie on every story draft like a tattoo. His 24 years of experience with this publication leave their mark on me through the lessons I gained from my mistakes.
I would miss the Oxford comma — the final comma in a list before the conjunction — on people’s stories, and it would always come back to face me when I walked into class, the offending punctuation marked on the screen with a bright red circle.
People say many things about journalism. I hear about how it’s the first draft of history, how it’s meant to keep leaders accountable and lately, how much of it is inaccurate or biased.
But for me, journalism is about the truth. People fail to realize that the hardest part of journalism is that we actually aren’t allowed to make everything up. Maybe larger corporations can, but at the heart of journalism, and especially genuine, student-led journalism, no greater truths have been spoken. We don’t accept $5 coffee bribes, and we constantly spend time making sure we aren’t quoting a random blog instead of an official document or press release.
We are not just “The Media.” I am more than an entity, and my fellow staffers and I have built ourselves from the ground up to get to this point.
The past four years were spent in the same Room 138, one that never truly lost the smell of freshly printed magazines and musty newspapers. From the early days of Journalism 1 to climbing up from a copy editor to a News editor, before finally becoming an editor-in-chief, my journey felt uniquely beautiful. Whether it was the little grammar corrections to learning how to interview adult sources and admin, I realized just how much I gained from working with equally dedicated peers.
We experienced competitions together and celebrated together, and our everlasting tradition of a pizza party remains the same.
Ultimately, what I hope to impart to the next generation of Accoladians is simple:
- Seek the truth
- Remember your 5W’s and the H
- Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy
Just as art should “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” I believe that the duty of a journalist lies in reporting genuine stories rooted in accuracy, fairness and objectivity.
Room 138 was only just the beginning. For those of us graduating, we must now refocus our journalistic lens on the larger world of college and beyond. Whether that be in different fields or even states, we can apply the lessons we learned in this classroom through how we communicate to others and convey our thoughts with our writing.
And for the ones we leave behind, don’t worry, because the shoe will fit.
