The end

 This is goodbye. It’s been a goodrun, but 100 years is enough. So as we finish this last issue of the 100th volume of The Chronicle, we are putting down our notebooks, packing away the computers and abandoning the presses. We quit.

 The hours are too long. Lots of us wake up every morning and stumble straight to the office. Waiting for people to call us back, we stay there all night. The crime report from the police department is the highlight of our day. When Chai’s went on food points, we thought we could keep going for at least another year. But the delivery service couldn’t handle the business and so Chai’s isn’t delivering anymore. We don’t want to either.

 The news is just getting too hard to cover. We can’t find people’s phone numbers anywhere. The Duke phonebook only has e-mail addresses and no one ever responds quickly enough. Finding quotes has become an ordeal because when we interview over Instant Messenger, all the comments come back like this: “LDOC wuz 2 much fun :)

 ”It’s too much effort to keep taking photographs in focus. The lighting outside keeps changing. Plus, some of our cameras are now more than a year old; it’s torturous working with such outdated equipment.

 Every time a sports team has a game, we have to find a reporter and convince him to follow the team out to Chattanooga, Tenn., Auburn, Ala.,or historic Jack Coombs Field. It’s notworth the walk through the quad, across Towerview and around WilRec just to write 350 words about how the women’s volleyball team once again employed a “bump-set-spike” strategy.

 Duke keeps building things. We just can’t keep track anymore; in fact,all year we forgot about the hole and noisy machinery on Science Drive that will become the French Sciences Center. None of us take science classes so we never walked by the construction. We figured after CIEMAS they’d be done with all that math and chemical stuff.

 The hospital is too confusing to walk through, let alone write about.We tried to find out which researchers were working on a cure for cancer. (We hear there are several of them.) We even at-tempted to call their press office. None of it worked. If someone at Duke finds something important, you can read it in the New York Times.

 The Chronicle’s editorial board has wanted to make this move for years, but the timing was never quite right. Until recently, there was no other place on campus to get information, but we feel like newspapers have outlived their usefulness. A hundred years ago,students needed the paper to tell what time graduation was scheduled for and how the dress code changed. Nowevery important announcement comes through e-mail. Most of what we’recalling news in The Chronicle is just some reporter re-writing an e-mail that one of our editors got a day before you did. Our primary purpose is publish-ing a crossword puzzle that takes al-most exactly 55 minutes to finish—ex-actly the length of a lecture class.