Week 1 & 2 Summary

Last Tuesday, Sep. 7, was our first official meeting of the year. And it was PERFECT!

The week prior, as I wrote about in my last post, was a huge disappointment. However, everything Week 1 lacked for in substance was made up for aplenty by our first real meeting. Students were literally pouring into our office in McGauvran Student Union hoping learn about the newspaper, and see what we're about! (I'm sure our advertisements for giving out free pizza at the meetings should be credited for the large turnout as well.) We literally needed to be creative with furtniture in the office because we ran out of seats before the meeting even began!

The beginning of the year is always the most exciting, in my eyes. The first few weeks of schools, many students are trying to find their niche at UML, and hopefully, some will find home in our paper. Already, we have a handful of freshmen who I absolutely adore. Even though I have nothing but good things to say about them, I will keep their names anonymous for confidential reasons. These students, though, are seriously amazing. They bring a new level of energy to the paper and I am absolutely ecstatic to work with them! Seriously- I have been on the paper for four years now, and I can't remember the last time I got to see this much enthusiasm in new students!

Other new, exciting things are happening at the paper as well. This semester, we have created two new positions the Connector has never seen before: a Campus Life Editor, who will be in charge of overseeing the Campus Life section and finding content to fill it with, and a Assistant Arts & Entertainment Editor, who will aid our current A&E editor, JM, with work while he moves on from college and establishes a nice life outside of UML.

I am also taking in a lot advice from my summer boss and learning to organize a little better. My love for making lists is FINALLY paying off- I have a "Sunday checklist", a reorganized photo station, and best of all, a weekly theme to discuss at Thursday night editor meetings.

As of now, we only have a few real problems to tackle. They all involve printed embarassments in the paper. We need to work on avoiding little (or like this week, BIG) mistakes at layout on Sundays. One article accidentally got printed twice, and one article didn't get printed at all, because of a sloppy run through job by a few of us. Mistakes like these are due, plain and simply, to exhaustion. We spend Sundays from 11 a.m to 8 or 9 p.m working on the paper, and at certain point, we are ready to just LEAVE and go home. I'm hoping that by cracking down on copy editing and article managing throughout the week BEFORE layout on Sunday will alleviate some of these problems.

Issue 3 is right around the corner, and I am excited to see how things will pan out next week.