Friday, September 11, 2015

The Value of Struggle: On My Friend, Alison Parker

It’s 6:58pm on a Thursday night, and we are, very literally, a couple of minutes away from an hour-long budget meeting. Fifteen of us are uneasily rocking back and forth in our rolling chairs in the bleakly dank basement of Anthony-Seeger Hall, just a few feet back from South Main Street in Harrisonburg, Virginia. As college journalists, this is our proud, outdated home, where we gather four times a week for not enough money and not enough recognition. Our budget meeting – a biweekly gathering to discuss the litany of section stories the editorial staff has lined up – is going way longer than usual. On this particular evening, you can chalk that up to Torie, our editor-in-chief, who is eviscerating our story ideas, one after another, like neatly lined paper lambs to the slaughter. Torie’s just doing her job – the more scrutiny a story idea undergoes, the better it’s likely to turn out, of course – but that hard reality doesn’t make this particular night any less agonizing.