When I tell non-staffers that being on the newspaper staff is like playing a sport, they roll their eyes at me. They think that I’m crazy. But when I say it under my breath during Friday night paste-up, the person at the computer next to me wholeheartedly agrees.
So before everyone reads and laughs at my apparently blasphemous statement, let me explain:
Paste-up is when the entire staff of the Eagle Edition gathers on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights to layout the newspaper (the juniors and seniors also come in on Saturday all day and sometimes Sunday). This ritual happens once about every six weeks and is steeped with tradition, caffeine, and stress.
Senior editors bustle around trying to make sure that Adobe InDesign isn’t crashing and that sophomores are focusing on their work. Mrs. Meier is grading pages in her office, trying to drown out the teen-aged voices yelling about who has page four open and if someone has read their story. The lucky ones who are finished with their pages, hang outside of the room, cramming their faces with goldfish, hoping that an editor doesn’t notice that they have nothing else to do.
It’s sheer chaos.
But if we don’t act like a team, – helping each other out, encouraging people when their page gets a bad critique – the scene will remain sheer chaos and the paper will be bad. It would be as if the football team went to the championship game without having held one practice.
So if you are reading this – hopefully you’ve changed your mind about the non-sports comment – now wondering who would give up their weekend to do this to themselves, I beg of you to think again; that is not my point in documenting the innermost workings of the staff. Because paste-up is more than stress. It’s a time where we can stop worrying about that Calculus test and focus on picas and junk food and being a journalistic team.
And we all love every minute of it.
Journalism student, class of 2010
