The Death Issue: The Ed's Note (Golden Ram III)

Einstein was right, time is relative to the observer. When you’re staring down the barrel of inevitable failure, time slows down. People and events flash past you at the speed of boson, surrounding you everywhere yet unable to be fully comprehended. Stay with it, and you can live a lifetime fighting for a cause that exists only in a split-second timeframe.

And with that, an era comes to an end at Westmoor. For all of you that have thoroughly enjoyed this newspaper for its insightful articles and creative design, for all of you that have thoroughly detested this newspaper for its at-times controversial ideas and raunchy comedy, for all of you that didn’t even know we existed, this is our final issue. The Death Issue, you might say. And to make sure we go out with a bang, we’ve taken and expanded upon everything that has made this publication unique for a high school newspaper. Huge debates and opinionated pieces, crude non-sequitur humor, in-depth consumer reporting, articles that provide perspective rather than simple reporting, and, something I never thought possible before in a paper made almost exclusively by a core group of geeks, a genuinely emotional narrative piece of inner-discovery.

You’ll find the usual bits and pieces this issue; the good ol’ Opinions section, this time with an absolutely monstrous debate over the use of steroids in the sporting world; Campus Life, where you’ll find the recent Bone Chiller production, a Limelight that was eminent-domained over to the section, and a long discussion of the AP Program and the type of student mindset it has driven us to (a bit of a rant, sorry), along with a pair of differing views on the Sojourn to the Past trip, both of which are interesting—and valid; Columns, in which a trigger-happy editor, disillusioned with dreams of ‘Sovereignty’, has gone on and hired SEVEN columnists for the issue; and of course the usual indefinite junk that we stick into The Shelter, Home of the Homeless Articles.

We’ve also expanded a bit, with a couple of new sections that offer new avenues for articles, and hopefully help to flesh out The Golden Ram and make it a bit more of a ‘complete’ paper. The Knowledge Base was planned to be a type of haven for all things geeky and science-related. Albeit without a planned question/answer column (much like Cecil Adams’ Straight Dope), it hosts a single article about CPUs, the first of what was planned to be a multi-part series covering every aspect of PC components. The Humor Section also appears, but like the Knowledge Base is more like a techdemo of things planned. In true TR fashion though, we’re exposing the truth behind the lies, and mixing that in with the lies that are the truth behind those lies, all for a wondrously confusing mix of truth, lies, and Muckrake News.

And that is about 24 pages and a week of literally non-stop toil, boiled down to about two paragraphs.

In sophomore year (2003-2004), when I first started up the Journalism Club with a group of friends and our teacher advisor, Mr. Nghe, the dream was in part to create a truly kick-ass paper, but more importantly, to give students the opportunity to participate in journalism—writing articles, doing layouts, creating artwork, the works. For the majority of us, as sophomores, we had no chance at all to participate in the official school newspaper, The Rampage, as the Publications class is available only to upperclassmen. Our only recourse then, was to make a paper of our own, that was freely open for anyone to participate in; freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, those whose class schedules didn’t allow for them to be able to participate in the Publications class, those who were committed full-time to the entire process of publishing a newspaper, and those who only wanted to do a freelance bit or two. The dream was, simply, to create an open forum that was truly open, with space freely available to anybody who was willing to write with a decent level of proficiency, with no obligations or consequences attached.

Have we achieved that goal? Seeing as this is our final hurrah, apparently not. A better question may be to first ask why we have failed in producing a successful, ongoing newspaper. The simple and short surface answer is that we didn’t have the funds. Personally, I started Journalism Club so that I could have the opportunity to explore different avenues of writing. Club fundraising, then, was not a top priority of mine at the outset, and as I gradually came to the realization that it was all but a necessary part of achieving anything at Westmoor, my attempts at organizing fundraising and acquiring funds proved, admittedly, to be lackluster at best. In Journalism Club this year and last, we were like some brilliant team of SkunkWorks engineers, brimming with ideas and designs, yet utterly powerless to realize any of them without some career CEO coming in to manage the business side of things. One of the toughest lessons that I have had to learn about society is that no matter how talented you are, or how much determination you have, or how many people you have backing you up, it all means nothing unless you have the money to execute.

Delightfully revelatory is that it applies even at this level of high school club economics.

I believe the root of the problem, however, lies with the motivation of the students. After all, there are clubs that rake in hundreds of dollars every International Foods Day, that can find the money to pay for extraneous things such as field trip excursions and t-shirts. Meanwhile, it is only now that we, after an entire year, have managed to scrounge around the money to print a single issue, that is essential to the purpose of our club (and, in my opinion at least, a student newspaper, both as an opportunity for writers and as reading material for students, is much more beneficial to the entire school than $400 spent going to a field trip for some 50-odd students... but that’s for another article someday.) While some of this stems from my own inability to organize fundraising at the level that many other club leaders do, the problem lies more in the general unwillingness of the students to help out in raising the funds. Ideally, however, students should be able to do just that, walk in, write their article, and then leave with no other obligations or strings attached, but realistically, it is necessary for all members of a club to actively participate in fundraising in order for the club to achieve its purpose. I don’t blame the students, though, and in all truth, maybe I would have rathered this club to go down with some semblance of dignity, than to sell out to this rampant and sole focus on fundraising that seems to pervade almost every club at Westmoor.

While we did, for three short issues, provide the kind of ‘Open Door’ freelance newspaper environment that was so lacking when we first decided to start the club back in October 2003, this paper ultimately degraded into more of a dictatorial, one-person project, partly based on the lack of willingness by anyone else to assert interest and willpower, and partly based on my own insecurities over letting others do work that might not turn out the way that I intended. In that then, I guess you could say that although we did enable the opportunity for freelance-style journalism, we failed to do enough to actually foster the development of such a paper. That, if anything, is my regret over the last two years.

We depart now, some of us to pursue other loves and glories, some of us to simply wallow in the shadows of dreams unrealized. Hopefully you’ll all enjoy this very last issue... a testament, perhaps, to the way high school journalism should have been done.