Farewells and salutations
People say that when your job consumes your life, your coworkers become your best friends. It wasn’t something I believed wholeheartedly until I found a job I really loved. My part-time gig at the local library during high school gave me gas money and an extensive knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System but not much else. I liked being surrounded by words, but I didn’t just want to check them in and out; I wanted to write them. With TKS, I had the opportunity to do just that–and get paid for it.
I’ll be honest: the pay at my library job was better. The average TKS editor probably puts in 20-25 hours of work a week and gets compensated for 8. You don’t do it for the money. You do it for the camaraderie that comes from spending your Wednesday nights in a cramped office, yelling obscenities at the computers and discussing the merits of the Oxford comma. You do it for the people who will argue with you, even if they are heretics and won’t use the Oxford comma even outside of journalistic situations. You write stories for your audience, but you also write them for each other. The best tips come from your co-editor who works in an administrative office and catches snippets of college drama around the coffeemaker. The best insight comes from your co-editor who’s interviewed almost every professor on campus and knows who to talk to and when. The best stories are produced by a team, with one person reading through city ordinances at 1 a.m. and another finding a press pass for the reporter whose tape recorder is always running.
John has put together an excellent team for next year, and it’s exciting to welcome Charlie, Paige, Matt, Grant, Carina, Michelle, Sam & Sam, Gretchen, and Elizabeth (HA OXFORD COMMA HA) to the pub office. Maybe they will surpass previous editors and actually use this blog. (One can dream.) But it’s not about surpassing–not really. A good editorial staff builds on the work of previous editors. And our previous editors have done a lot.
Tomorrow morning, nine former TKS editors will graduate. Who will write the dirty investigative stories now that Ben is gone? Who will fill Kevin’s role of being sarcastic about everything? Who will indulge my OCD if Anni and Rachel can’t?
I’m excited about the new staff, especially my new co-editor, the fantastic Charlie Gorney. It’ll just take a little getting used to. But I’ll come back in January after spending the fall in Berlin and find everyone to be working together seamlessly in an atmosphere as intense and wacky and fun as before. Right, guys? Right?