Why do we read student newspapers? Why do we, every week, pick up any of the campus publications and question, judge, accept, or concur with the articles inside? We are offended by them. We are amused by them. They give us something to do between classes, while sitting down for lunch, or taking study breaks. They are there to provide information, and to give the student body its voice. We read these newspapers because, I feel, they harken back to a time when adults were viewed as intellectually stimulated individuals, keeping up with the news of the world, the state of their community, and the latest adventures of Charlie Brown. There is something in the image of a person sitting with the pages of a newspaper spread in front of her. Over our coffee or Tiki-Ming, we read the articles in these papers because we hope to read something that we can connect to, that we feel represents us.
I am not a journalist. I don’t claim to be at the forefront of politics, student or otherwise. I write what I know and understand—that is all I can contribute. Sometimes, people may see my columns, particularly the topics about which I write, as being a little overbearing, or pointless, or rambling, or downright stupid. I wanted to write for the Tribune this year because I felt I had something to say to the students of McGill that would make them laugh, something to take them out of the rest of the newspaper, if for a moment, and something that might strike them as funny or odd or questionable. I never wrote anything that would purposely and maliciously offend or anger. I didn’t tackle world politics because I don’t know how, and I have no opinions that I personally consider valid or challenging. Everything I know about the world I learn from other sources, so recycling their opinions, maybe slightly varied, as my own was not my goal. I honestly just wanted to write about Facebook and BDP and how much I hate pants (though that last one somehow never managed to get through). And I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes my articles were spur-of-the-moment choices that somehow managed to work out, but I write those topics better than the ones I heavily meditate on.
I appreciate our student newspapers because, otherwise, a tradition that has been around at universities for ages would be missing. That sense of a student-run voice on campus is telling of the importance of old styles of information transmission. We may all have social networking and cell phones and blogs and computer passwords, but we also have newspapers, and there will never be reason to get rid of them. Regardless of the various newspaper-related websites we can readily visit, I know I’d still rather walk through the halls of the Arts Building while seeing people with physical copies of a newspaper in their hands than a series of illuminated faces peering into laptops and smartphones. The next time you read a newspaper, think of the work that goes into it: the editing, the photography, the layout, and the articles themselves. Remember that no matter how many Kindles we may own one day, they will never leave ink on our fingers. They will never physically imprint the words of the writer onto your skin. How much closer can you get to my words than that?
