Every weeknight, usually around 1 or 2 a.m., a member of the Daily's staff calls a guy named Fred. Fred works at Gannett Publishing and has a classic Irish Boston accent, which he used one night this semester to ask if I had been one of the students peeing on the floor at Winter Bash. (I hadn't.) As the late-shift worker at the printer that makes the paper version of the Daily, he's also one of the last cogs in the over 100-person machine that produces this paper every day.
Fred is important, but Fred is not the Daily. And neither am I.
This newspaper, in all its imperfection, is an evolving experiment in putting the serious responsibility of being the most authentic and official voice of Tufts in the eager and inexperienced hands of a bunch of college kids. It's the product of the varying commitment of over 100 staffers and the tireless dedication of their bold and savvy executive editors - all of whom are 19 to 23 years old.
It's pretty freaky. We screw up a lot. We sometimes miss important stories. We forget to take out Oxford commas, and we misspell names. We accidentally run ads that don't deserve to be published at Tufts or anywhere. We can be as forgetful, lazy and ignorant as the rest of our peers.
But, as a particularly observant freshman copy editor reminded me last week, the Daily is also kind of a miracle. What other club could pull so many smart and talented students away from their dorm rooms, away from studying and away from their other friends to spend hours each semester running around campus with a notebook or a camera or sitting in the basement of Curtis Hall yelling obscenities at a misbehaving computer? What other kind of club could convince its members to make themselves totally vulnerable on a daily basis by exposing their work - their opinions, their art, their writing - to over a thousand people, each of whose eye is more critical than the next?
I'd like to think that vulnerability is thrilling and helps us learn. Not all of us will go on to report news, write movie reviews, copy edit or take photos for a living. Not all of us will carry the skill of negotiating with an administrator's secretary or a hockey coach for a five-minute interview into the real world. Same goes for you guys, the readers: This may come as a shock, but the habit of writing op-eds to a physical daily newspaper - or even reading one - probably won't translate into your lives after graduation.
But to be part of a daily, independent college paper is to learn how to find the truth in a chorus of voices and to make it heard. It's about having the courage to put yourself and your work out there for the scrutiny of your peers. And it's about taking the inevitable criticisms and picking out the important ones to internalize and make whatever personal or institutional change is possible in four years. That's why I asked Tufts in my letter at the beginning of the semester to question us and not to let us spend the semester thinking the Daily, Tufts students and the administration were right all the time. And it's why I'm thanking everyone at Tufts, on and off the Daily's masthead, for every op-ed, every column and every late-night heart-to-heart about what we're doing wrong.
I'm leaving the key to the Daily in the hands of some of the most aware and intelligent colleagues I could have asked for, and I'd like to thank you in advance for giving them as hard a time as you gave me. It may not look the same in the years to come, but the Daily will continue to bring Tufts the news, features, arts, sports and opinion sections - and yes, fine, the sudoku - every day, as long as the campus continues to tell us how we could do it better. We have never done it for our health or because we think we're the best at it. We've been doing it since 1980 because we know we can always do better. Thank you, Tufts, for your help with that. Thank you, Daily, for four years. It's been real.
Martha Shanahan
Editor-in-Chief
