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 As college journalists, this is our proud, outdated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.
