<day was not a good Thursday. Here’s why. Normally, Kinsey and I, your honorable Editors-in-Chief, roll into the office around 9 a.m. We embrace lovingly and talk about our feelings. Then we get down to business and make a newspaper.
Except for yesterday. Kinsey, who had given his comps talk the night before and was off flying to grad schools so they could desperately beg him to bring his brilliance to wherever, was indisposed. So I arrived, forlorn and lonely. I got a bagel and some tea and sat down to do whatever it is that we do to make the paper.
(Side note: many, many years ago, there was an Editor-in-Chief of the Carletonian who thought it would be a good idea to use software that no one else in the world uses and to buy computers that the college doesn’t own so that taking care of them is literally impossible. This was a bad decision.)
So I tried to open a page on one computer. It failed. This is not an event that is out of the ordinary for us. I would wager that we spend approximately 39 percent of our time working on the paper waiting for things to open or restarting things. I moved to another computer. Tried to open Quark. It corrupted page one. This is also not unusual. I then did all the normal rituals that we have invented as band-aids for our poor computers. Two hours later, I had made no progress. It was time to take drastic action. We needed to upgrade.
So I write this editorial from a computer lab in the CMC, where files open in under five seconds, where pages don’t just disappear and where we can open photos on every computer. This is the promised land. This is the future. Just because we’re coming at it six years late doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate these big screen iMacs just as much as every other newspaper in the country did long ago.
The fundamental problem with the Carletonian is that it has stayed the same for years and years and years. This year, we’re trying to change that. We’ve enlisted the fabulous help of Nadine Sunderland, Kendra Strode and the SCIC. We’re getting new computers and new software. We’re doing what hasn’t been done in at least fifty years: making the paper better.
The editorial represents the views of The Carletonian editors (but, as usual, mostly those of Devin Daugherty).