By Margaret Mattes
It’s 8:45 on a Tuesday night in Princeton High School. The hallways are empty, the classrooms are dark, and the voices of 1,200 very loud students will not be here for hours. Yet, there is something unusual going on in room 173. There’s an eclectic mixture of classic rock and new Indie blasting from the speakers, leftover Chinese food sitting on the radiator, and some twenty PHS students sitting at computers looking very excited. This is Tower production.
The Tower is Princeton High School’s award winning student newspaper and, quite frankly, it might just be the thing about PHS I love the most. The Tower is the most time consuming extracurricular, the most aggravating when things go wrong, and the reason why I sometimes find myself doing my math homework at midnight, but it is also the activity to which I am most dedicated and enjoy the most. Each month, the staff and I put together a paper, which, for the most part, makes me proud to call myself editor-in-chief.
Publishing a newspaper may be a full-time job for some adults, but for our editing staff of sixteen, it’s something we do on top of being full-time high school students and, sometimes, it can be dizzying. Discuss, write, edit, lay, print, repeat.
Discuss: I make sure to bring pizza to the issue review meeting, the time when we look over the past issue and talk about article lists for the subsequent issue, because it makes the editing staff ten times happier. While eating, we talk about the paper: the wrong month was published on the top of a few of the pages, a few articles were late, a couple writers ignored edits, the sports photos were too dark. What are the problems and how can we fix them? On to the next issue. Any front-page ideas? What do we want to change? After spending twenty minutes debating on whether the line at the bottom of the page should be black or grey, I call the meeting to an end and we all head off, ready to start the process of creating a newspaper.
Write: After sending out a schedule with dates and deadlines, which are too often forgotten, the process has truly begun. The backbone of the paper comes down to writing quality, so this is the most important step of our publication. For staff writers, this is the period to extract their creative juices; for editors, it is the time to either write or relax and for senior editors, the managing editors and me, it is time to write editorials. Ever since becoming editor-in-chief in January, I have had much more appreciation for the New York Times’s Editorial Staff who turn out three or four enjoyable and engaging editorials every day. I have no such talent. I can barely get one article done in four weeks and it is very rarely, if ever, pleasurable or absorbing.
Edit: First drafts are handed in, edited by section editors and skimmed by senior editors. Common problems, which remind me to buy a stress ball on which to take my anger out, include quoting old Tower staff members, forgetting how to use commas, and using slang in formal writing. All the editors turn into English teachers for a few afternoons as meetings are scheduled to talk with writers about structure and language. Perhaps the most challenging part of improving a student-run newspaper is convincing fellow students that they, the writers, must listen to editors and as section editors critique writers, I watch and am very often impressed by the results. Final drafts go through the editing process and then get sent to the advisors.
Lay: After articles are assembled and tweaked, the staff is ready to begin putting the paper together- production. For eighteen long hours, split up among four days, we sit in a computer lab, the objects of which I have memorized, and design. Over breaks for coffee, chips, burritos, sushi, hoagies, and lo-mein, we exchange ideas concerning layouts, articles, and writers. Production is the reason why I love Tower. I remember the first time I stayed for one of the six-hour days, from three to nine, and, even as the hours ticked by, there was a certain vitality and excitement in the room. And what’s more, I have developed a love for the people in the room. Having gone through three different staffs, I can confidently say that The Tower consistently attracts some of the quirkiest, the funniest, and the most interesting students from around the school. During those six hours, I not only stare at computer screens and want to pull my hair out when the machines do not cooperate, but I also have developed friendships, which I know will last forever.
Print: The excitement on the last night of production is boundless. After each page is finished, the advisors approve it and it gets tacked on to the board, ready for publication. The morning after the final day of production, which is always a nine o’clock day, I sleepily hand the pages to Principal Snyder to receive his final approval. With his signature, we are ready for print.
The day on which the paper comes out is always the best day of the month. I come out of my class at the beginning of break, the time during which students and faculty eat lunch and relax, and find a copy of The Tower waiting for me. Finally our work has paid off and walking through the hallways, seeing over 1,200 students and hundreds of faculty opening the paper, pointing, laughing, and initiating discussion, I know that we have done something right. Journalism may be a dying art, but at Princeton High School it is alive and well, and I plan to keep it that way.
