The slant-roof cave of 301 Flowers has been my Wednesday night home for the past year. I have spent time slaving away on content and layout, struggling over headlines and captions and worrying over correct AP style and exciting ledes. I can tell you that correct Chronicle style forbids first-person ledes, but this isn't the Chronicle-this is recess.
For ten volumes, recess has been the campus' arts and entertainment publication, but the publication almost ended as quickly as it began.
"At first we had no idea what we were doing, we just stumbled through it, we didn't close till 5 a.m. and I skipped all my classes the next morning," recess' first editor Adam Winer said about the first night of production during the school year. "The process was so demoralizing I almost walked away from it right there."
Winer, Trinity '98, premiered the weekly section in The Chronicle's summer send-home issue for Volume 94. The section replaced the once-popular Chronicle arts section known as R&R, which had suffered a decline in both content and style in its final years. Rather than continue with a failing publication, Winer decided to start from scratch, keeping the focus on arts and entertainment but making it more accessible to readers.
"R&R had become a little too indie and just plain bad.... We wanted it to be a little more mainstream and not be 'too cool for school,'" Winer said.
The first years of recess featured a full-page photo on the cover and the articles were written and placed on the page in a more informal fashion, creating a purposeful contrast with the hard news of The Chronicle. The leadership of recess prided themselves on their semi-autonomous status and their indie magazine-like style.
However, the appearance of recess took a sharp turn in its sixth year when budget constraints cut the number of pages down from 16 to 12 and, eventually, to eight. Editors Dean Chapman and David Walters, both Trinity '04, decided to ditch the cover photo to save room for more content. The aesthetic change was accompanied by a stronger emphasis on arts journalism with slightly more serious stories. The indie magazine became more like a Chronicle sub-section.
"It became a lot more news-like," said Chapman, now is his final year at Columbia Law School. "We wanted it to be entertaining as well as informative."
Chapman's partner-in-crime, Walters, made sure that though the section had become more sober, it retained some of its more surreal roots. Walters wrote a three-part feature on a service where users paid for a fake girlfriend, complete with phone calls and hand-written letters. The piece is part commentary on the dysfunctional nature of modern relationships and part product of Walters' admitted self-indulgent tendencies.
"There is a photo of me 'sleeping' with my fake girlfriend," Walters explained. "I am naked under a bed sheet, holding a computer and smoking a cigarette-the shot is nasty."
Walters, like many other recess staff members, decided to pursue a career in the arts after leaving Duke. After spending a summer as a South Carolina Governor's School counselor, Walters moved to New York City, worked as an intern for FHM and eventually worked his way into an assistant editor position at Esquire.
Winer, who also worked for FHM until the magazine's print edition folded in 2007, now appears on VH1's Best Week Ever and does freelance writing. Tim Perzyk, Trinity '02 and volume 4 editor, now works in digital media for NBC Universal's Bravo network after earning an Master in Business Administration from Harvard.
"I didn't plan on working [in entertainment] when I was in college," Perzyk said. "I went to business school and realized it was the last chance to do what I really loved."
Alumni like Chapman represent the other path for former editors. Corinne Low, Trinity '06 and editor in recess' eight year, is now finishing her second year at McKinsey and Company, a top consulting firm, and plans to attend Columbia University in the fall to pursue a Ph.D. in economics. Her immediate predecessor, Jon Schnaars, used his journalism and editing skills-honed at recess-in his work as editor for a mental health news Web site.
"recess really helped me at my new job, because I had to lead a group of 20-30 volunteers and make sure we were all on the same page," said Schnaars, who supervises a small group of writers and web designers in his current position.
Although there have been many changes to the section since its first issue, from tone to design, certain aspects have remained the same. The most evident is the satirical recurring piece known as the Sandbox, which Winer said allowed for writing not seen anywhere else in the Chronicle.
A less tangible continuity has been recess' goal of providing approachable arts journalism that is slightly more compelling than the more respectable, more straight-forward stories of its mother-publication.
"We wanted to prove that writing didn't have to be dry, hard journalism," Winer said. "It was supposed to be fun, especially when you got to write about awesome sh-."
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