By: Steven Adamo
Juan Calvillo, the ELAC Campus News editor-in-chief, requested that I write the first (of which we hope) is an ongoing newspaper column–inviting Campus News alumni to share their experiences. The column’s aim is to bring a face to a very lively process that is making this newspaper.
Hearing the rhetoric during the 2016 election (and how it was reported) inspired me to take the J-101 class.
The falsehoods posted on the internet, in our own media—unchecked and spreading rapidly through social media, were much different than the usual political back-and-forth.
An aspect of J-101 that I surprisingly enjoyed was the assignment to go around campus and look for a feature story. There are over 1,500 processors at ELAC and a lot more students, all with unique stories that should fill a magazine.
However free people are about sharing personal information on Twitter, I quickly realized that is not the case in journalism. People hesitate when it means being put on the official record.
The importance of the official record is that you can verify that an event happened and that it happened in this way at this time.
When there is no verifiable record, truth becomes meaningless. It’s easy to edit a story 20 years later on the internet, but it’s a lot harder to track down hundreds and thousands of newspapers and edit them by hand.
While studying journalism at ELAC, I expected to learn about the fact-checking and ap style, but I didn’t expect to be constantly unexpected.
Every new article assigned shines a spotlight on an entirely different subject. One week you’re learning the history of the beautiful murals on campus, the next you’re slowly becoming an expert on ELAC’s drainage system. Being a journalist, it seems, is a constant state of learning, listening and trying to understand.
While EIC for Campus News, I was put out of my comfort zone many times and am all the more thankful for it. The truth isn’t always easy to take. A lot of times, it stings pretty bad, but I’m guessing that’s what learning something important is supposed to feel like.
The highlight of the newspaper business is the newsroom during deadlines. After a year of being isolated from our loved-ones, teamwork feels extra special.
There’s a lot of falsehoods being spread and it’s up to truthtellers to set the record straight. It’s sometimes boring and tedious, but being one of the pillars of democracy isn’t supposed to be easy.
The next group of journalists that just finished their first pup edition got to experience their newsroom in a completely different way than I. All virtually opposed to a shared room on campus.
When the E7 building flooded in 2018, we had to temporarily move our entire newsroom to a different department. It seems that no matter what obstacles occurred, the news has to get out — even if it’s just ELAC Campus News
If you would like to look through the evolution of ELAC over the past 75 years, please visit www.elaccampusnews.com/archive.