I’ve got something to confess: when I first set foot in McCallum, I had no intention of joining the newspaper staff. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even know the school had a newspaper. I was fourteen at the time and, embarrassed though I am to admit it, I fancied myself a graphic design connoisseur; on my choice sheet, I’d seen an elective course called “digital media,” and assumed it to be in that vein. Little did I know it was actually the prerequisite for the newspaper course. I’ll admit, back then I was a little irritated when the realization hit me. After all, it sounded like a waste of time.
Three years later, though, and I can say with some confidence that signing up for that class may have been the best mistake I ever made.
Now I’m going into my senior year not only as an editor, but a fairly esteemed writer with stories that have been republished and referenced by Fox, The New York Post, and even some reputable news outlets as well. I’ve had the privilege of conducting interviews with some truly interesting people, ranging from fellow students to media and marketing professionals operating from several states away. The lauded Vanderbilt University even offered me an honorary to be republished in their student editorial magazine.
But enough self-embellishment. What I consider the most important thing to specifically have come out of the past year on-staff has got to be the opportunity it gave me to cut out my niche as a writer. For some much-needed context, my first year on the newspaper was insightful, to be sure; I wrote more, I covered more, I interviewed more, I did more. Nevertheless, the quality of my writing was nothing particularly unique. Not to say it was bad, by any means; to my past-self’s credit, if I were to write a news or feature story now, I cannot be sure it would be distinguishable in quality from those written during that first year. Rather, what I mean to say is that they lacked a certain sauce, a special ingredient to set them apart from anything else written by other staff members doing similar work. This was remedied, this year, by my exploits with opinion writing.
Indeed, I had written several editorial pieces before this year, but they were lacking in most important aspects. Two were reviews that could’ve said as much using maybe half the total word count, and one was a column that, to be blunt, maybe would’ve made for a good story if I’d bothered to actually interview the person it was about, and at that point it would’ve been more of a feature profile.
If you asked me to pinpoint the exact turning point in which I decided to give the section another try, I’d be hard pressed to give you a reason. The closest thing to an answer I can muster is that I began the year with an opinion piece, a board editorial denouncing some transphobic agitators who’d controversially appeared before the school unannounced, that I’d stepped up to write. From there it simply became routine; every issue cycle this year, I wrote one or two personal columns about whatever was on my mind at the time, be it something lofty as genocide or trivial as movie trends. Over time the process would click more and more, and I came to realize that, stylistically speaking, opinion writing offered an entirely different avenue of expression when it came to the writing process itself.
My parents will tell you I’ve always been a strongly opinionated individual, but it took sixteen entire years before I finally realized how to formulate my views into cohesive arguments I could share with others. How embarrassingly behind the curve I am.
To put it as simply as I can, jazz is to classical music what editorial writing is to journalism overall. It increases to writer’s reliance on the momentum, concision, and style of their prose. Not to discredit the other sections, of course; all good writing relies on these things to some degree. However, their importance is particularly accentuated here. You have no quotes. You have no interesting people and life stories to use as a crutch. You have nothing except your wits, the facts, and the keyboard in front of you.
The following five pieces are the ones I’ve produced over the past year that I believe best represent that thought. Nevertheless, my time as a columnist is far from over: I want to improve my craft in the future; I want to motivate you to ask your own questions, and use my thoughts to springboard your own dive into research and the information that’s out there; more than anything, though, I want to be the reason you think academic journals are boring.
Is the film industry (block)busted?
To be frank, in terms of the weight of the subject matter, this is peanuts compared to some of the things I would go on to cover throughout the year. Still, it functions in my eyes as an effective verbalization of an issue that persists in the backs of thousands, if not millions of American minds, and clearly provides an explanation of said problem backed up by numerous statistics and data sets, perhaps more than any other column of mine. Most importantly, though, was how the process of writing this story taught me to properly blend the aforementioned data into the argument in a way that didn’t bring the flow to an unflattering halt. Source blending, I would come to learn, is one of the foremost valuable tricks in any columnist’s arsenal.
New policies patronize
Here’s an unspoken truth that I’ve taken note of both before and after writing this story: columns about issues exclusive to your high school do not typically rake in awards. However, that does not deprive them of merit. Why, you ask? It’s because, ironically, more people, especially students, actually read them. I went into writing this article about the issues of increased online and physical security at my school knowing it lacked the prestige or authority of an exposé on the ongoing atrocities in the Congo or something similar. Yet, to my surprise, it received more clicks and overall engagement than any other I wrote this year, in spite of being the only one about local troubles. It went a long way in dissuading my mental aversion to writing similar columns about school-centric problems. It goes to show that while writing about broad issues can give you critical praise, focusing on the smaller stories nets you street cred, which can turn out to be the more valuable reward.
Carelessness or callousness costs lives
If you can excuse my pride for just a moment, I’d like to share with conviction that this story was not only the most important thing I wrote all year, but was also, culturally speaking, entirely ahead of the curve. As I would lament in the article itself, this column, a scathing and unabated decrying of the Israeli government in wake of their merciless counterattack on the people of Palestine, would only be published in January, around the time the sentiments I shared began to bleed into and populate the mainstream media and society. However, I should add that this column was started in November, and over the course of several revisions and updates, almost completely retained its initial structure and argument. When the time finally came to publish, in spite of the shifting public opinion, my advisor still laid unto me the grave concerns he shared for the potential backlash it could receive. Although none actually manifested, the story functions to me as a lesson that you should be prepared to stand beside any opinion you put to the press, and that the fear of dissent shouldn’t dissuade you from defending your ideas. It also taught me a thing or two about deadlines, but I’m still learning that bit.
Election alarmism grows tiresome
There’s a reason why almost no one, at least in my age group, watches the news anymore: it’s almost impossible to make politics interesting to the average reader/viewer. Bureaucracy is, by its very nature, a tremendously boring field. Hence, my column about the election became an attack on the bureaucratic process itself. Still, I would come to realize during writing that far too many stories of a similar variety were already out there. That’s when one of the more important revelations of the year was made to me, that of the importance of perspective with regards to editorial writing, the truth that anyone can complain about anything, but to have a superior reason to complain about something in comparison to everyone else will give your audience, in turn, a superior reason to read what you have to say. By incorporating my unique perspective as a student, and as someone who would be voting in the upcoming election, my ethos, along with the overall quality of the piece, substantially improved.
Tick, tock for an informed internet
How do you write about two topics too similar to warrant separate stories, but too different to present together cohesively? This was the issue I was forced to tackle in my final editorial of the year, and one that throughout the writing process would continuously stump me. It was an issue that, funnily enough, would be resolved through the simplest of means, namely the basic human intuition of comparison and contrasting. My internal issue when writing this story, how to logically transition and connect between the bill to ban TikTok and the political content filter implemented by the Meta corporation, became the driving question of the piece itself, and taught yet another valuable lesson: as a columnist, it’s key to vocalize your internal question when writing. Chances are, more people out there are wondering the same thing.
