A Reminiscence on a Local Rag
The newspaper, it is said, is dying.
Print journalism's obituary has been published a thousand times; each time, it must be admitted, there are fewer next-of-kin listed. Newspapers, even large ones, tend to fare as well as the American small business in disasters. And in this particular set of dark days, even the Los Angeles Times struggles along having lost a third of its revenue. Publications are losing ads left and right; they are tied to a physical edition which is a liability when numbers update on the hour. Papers are that elderly relative about whom you worry mildly with every unexpected phone call.
But there is one paper which I believe is safe from this unease: the Kenyon Collegian.
I have not thought about the Collegian in a few months, nor Kenyon College, my alma mater in Gambier, Ohio. It only resurfaced in my thoughts recently due to the unexpected appearance of an old Google Drive folder: a curious digital artifact of an issue I'd been invited to edit after I graduated. I stumbled into the digital dust.
Here were all that week's edited pieces with "Final" before their identifier: "Final Bromberg," "Final Baumann Con Trigger," "Final Pro Trigger," "Final Schatz," “Final Staff Ed.” These seemingly slipshod naming conventions were simply the names of contributors and issues at the time; the year could be guessed by serious students of (and at) Kenyon. But before I could click through any of the pieces, I was raptured into the faint smell of roasting potatoes, hot sandwiches, warm cookery and old newspapers.
That is the smell of the Collegian office, at least as I knew it. Perched above the atrium of Pierce Hall (pictured), the office's southward window had the major advantage of catching all the odors of the kitchen, from the morning's bacon to the evening's stir fry as well as wafts of illicit cigarettes smoked by cafeteria employees on the servery's roof. The effect was a snug one, although the office required no help in being snug; a square footage in the two hundreds contained six computers and a handful more editors and reporters, plus their dinners, with only two windows to aerate the heat, accumulated wisdom and dirty dishes. This did not include the editor-in-chief's closet, a gladiator's pit of hard commentary and grammatical fury to which staff members were invited when they had either done something very well or wrong (as an opinions editor, I was unfettered by facts and was happily never so called).
Tuesday night was my old editing night, often begun at 5PM sharp after classes, with a few snack breaks until 8PM. Then all was hustle until one in the morning when that week's opinions had been persuaded into making a point. Conveniently, as an editor you could also use this evening to write your own column, a privilege you told your writers was a sin and a crime I never commit in modern times. In the humid, richly muggy August evenings that began fall semester, you would enter when the day was still in its late prime, exiting seven hours later into the blessed moisture of evening dew falling on the grass as the trees exhaled earthy spices. But as autumn, then winter, crept in, you began to enter in the dark and leave in a frostier dark, more black than the ink on your hands from thumbing through back issues, trying to remember if the past year's editorial board had already complained about the trustee's lack of visibility.
The paper was a physical thing, and in these times of Zoom meetings, Slack conversations, Tiktok entertainment, that carries strong sentimental value. It bound the rich physicality of Kenyon with its equally rich drama. The paper was crisp with the December blasts as master plan bickering began to get severe; it was limp with the Indian summer humidity when returning writers had nothing new to say and the trustee's meeting had not yet happened. And each Monday before that week's issue began to be seriously put together, Professor Kluge would amble up to our offices and beat last week’s edition to hell in front of us, his index finger, seasoned by many typewriter strokes, ramrodding careless errors, bad conclusions, weak interrogations of faculty members. A compliment or two was dispensed per review and then his copy, marked up in ink like an old sailor, would be put aside, smelling of the cigar he smoked while reviewing it. It was among the finest classes I’d ever taken.
The delightful thing about the Collegian was that it took — and takes — itself seriously, almost zealously, over issues which ultimately affected a handful of people. No one outside of the Hill cares very much that back in 2016, Kenyon College made the ill-informed choice to abruptly close down a beloved, seedy drinking establishment and attempt to transfer the student body's drinking habits to a college-controlled basement bar with foosball tables. But here on my screen is the cool and passive-aggressive staff editorial in response to this event, dripping with the well-earned righteousness of the editorial we. The paper was often unperturbed by global affairs except for a conciliatory front page assessment of facts if it had been a slow news week. We would far rather publish another (constructively) critical piece about the plywood wall which the Students for Justice in Palestine had again erected on our main thoroughfare, knowing it would cause a delicious amount of noise and a reliable bombardment of local intrigue.
Nowadays, the Collegian is about as filled with the coronavirus as any major publication must be to not sound ignorant. But it has managed to slip in a few articles even in its last, written-entirely-from home edition which deny the scourge any press time. That is no small feat. The victory made me smile as I visited the site last night (I mean, several days ago) — the old spirit remains, guiding this year's team and in all their misadventures and typos. And it is that commitment to something bigger than the world — a town — which will keep its editions piled high in the entryways of Kenyon's buildings for decades to come. Perhaps not all is lost.
