Any Clarion staffer, past or present will tell you that getting a community college, student-run newspaper out on time takes a small miracle. As of 12:28 a.m. yesterday, I honestly don’t know if I’m even going to be able to put the issue you’re holding out on time. Hope I made it.
We would all love to have somebody dictating perfectly edited articles in our ears. The closest we’ll ever come to that is when a hot-breathed editor is hunched over your shoulder correcting your work. We have to track down sources, take our own photographs and deal with what seems like a thousand setbacks over the course of 14 days.
But the reason we do this is so that you, the present and future members of the Citrus community have an accurate picture of what life on campus is like at this moment in time.
A community we rarely hear from.
Over the past six months, the Clarion has only received one letter to the editor. During that same time period, we’ve written more than 200 articles. At about 350 words apiece, that means we get one letter for every 70,000 words we write, and I rounded down. Remember, these are words we write about you.
I’m not sure how we’ve made it this far like this. Every journalism book I’ve read stresses the need for the same things: a thirst for knowledge, accuracy in reporting and keeping the interests of your readers in mind.
(And everything I’ve seen on Worldstarhiphop.com has told me that if you talk about someone, they’ll usually want to find you. Not necessarily for good.)
So I thought, “What if they just don’t know how to reach us?”
The Clarion newsroom is located in the Technology Center building, room 123. We’re just north of the auto classes in the TE building, due south of the cosmetology center, kind of east of the Veterans Center and directly west from a bunch of plants. They look like the plant version of Koosh balls.
Our number here: (626) 914-8586. The number for our adviser, Meg O’Neil is the same but for the last digit: (626) 914-8588. The number for our dashingly handsome (single) editor-in-chief is (909) 749-4908.
If you don’t like hearing other people’s voices or finding out how somebody isn’t nearly as good-looking as they say they are, you can tell us how you feel by going to ccclarion.com/letters.
I’ve even put the guidelines for what letters we print in the link so you don’t have to go searching. I’ll still tell you right here that we run pretty much anything our readers send us, barring hate speech and poetry. (But poetry in the form of a letter…)
Worried about hurting someone’s feelings? Don’t be. Us journalists are naturally thick-skinned. We voluntarily send in our work to be ripped apart. It makes our writing better for you to read.
And at the end of the day, we’re student writers. Some of us will go on to make a career in journalism, but the majority of us won’t write another article after leaving the Clarion. That means we’ve got 16 weeks to get it right, and we need as much help as we can get.
