This summer, I spent far too many hours plowing through stacks of old papers in the Chronicle office. One day, much to my surprise and amusement, the bottom of one stack yielded an interest form I'd filled out at a Chronicle freshman info session in Fall 2005.
Perhaps I should have known that I was destined for editorship when I scrawled "copyediting/proofreading" in the Other section at the bottom of the sheet. But back then, all I wanted to do was report.
I couldn't wait to make my first phone calls, write my first lede, file my first story.
And I remember my awe as I listened to the editor, who led that information session. (I live in both hope and peculiar fear that some freshmen saw me that way at the beginning of this year.)
Now, as it did that day, the editor's job awes me. To be editor is to become one with The Chronicle, to know every nook and cranny of 301 Flowers, to know how to fix the copy machine, the fax machine, the most mangled article and the most mangled office friendship.
It is putting the paper to bed at 4 a.m., napping for an hour or two in Weasel's Place and then getting back up to interview an administrator first thing the next morning. It is the thrill of reading a story late at night, knowing that a reporter has explored every angle of the issue and that an editor has done her damnedest to turn a good story into a truly great one.
It is picking up one of the nation's best college papers each morning and feeling on top of the world, and it is being despised as the lowest of the low because of whatever error or supposed slant has made its way into the day's edition. It is waking up every morning (or afternoon, sometimes) knowing you'll spend at least 12 hours in the office.
It is demoralizing, exhausting, hazardous to one's health and grades. It is the greatest privilege a Duke student can have, and it is absolute bliss.
I am proud of the 149 newspapers we've put out this year, and I think we've more often than not lived up to our billing as the Tower of Campus Thought and Action.
The late, great Chronicle editor Matthew Sclafani once wrote, "Journalism is perhaps the only profession in which you receive more criticism for doing a better job. I get worried when people stop blasting The Chronicle, because if we make everyone happy, we aren't doing our jobs."
I know there are some readers who will be pleased to see me go, and will no doubt tell me so in the online comments on this article. I especially await the input of the cowardly ones who comment anonymously-John Matthews, Trinity '69 and Grad '76 and '84, who blogs as John in Carolina, and his ilk. Rest assured, I will enjoy reading all your comments even more than you will enjoy writing them.
But for your benefit and for the record, I've never been a card-carrying member of the ACLU (or even a CARD CARRYING MEMBER); I've received no payoffs from the Brodhead administration, as my pitifully small bankbook can attest; missed stories are the result of overtaxed staffers balancing class, life and work, and not a Marxist agenda; and no, I've never taken a class with a member of the Group of 88, whose poor judgment in placing that infamous ad still boggles my mind.
And if we at The Chronicle had the organizational skills and sinister mastermind some have imputed to us, we'd be off making our fortunes, not spending 80 hours each week in a cramped third-floor office squinting at computer screens, desperate to squeeze jobs out of a dying industry.
I was, however, completely wrong when I predicted that the lacrosse case was over, although I still absolutely believe that most students would like to see the case over and done with. I see now that that's not going to happen so easily, and I've come to believe that the litigation process is necessary for whatever closure there will ever be for this University, its students, its professoriate and its alumni.
As for me, my term ends with this issue. I will relinquish the editor's desk and return to the newsroom. All over this campus, there are issues to report, sources to interview and stories to file.
I can't wait.
David Graham is a Trinity junior and editor of The Chronicle. Like his predecessors, he aches with the knowledge that he will never be either again.
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