As this is my last issue as the editor of The Skyline View, I wanted to leave you with something enlightening, something meaningful… but not too cliché.

So, I decided I’d offer you a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at our paper, breaking up my thoughts and reflections for each issue.

Issue One:

The beginning of the semester on the newspaper staff is always exciting and always accompanied with new faces and a bunch of new ideas for improving the paper. For the first issue, I had the unique and solemn experience of interviewing my former statistics teacher, Patricia Deamer, after her return from New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina was responsible for taking away the life of her father and her aunt. I was sympathetic for my old math teacher and truly admired her ability to talk to me about such painful memories that were very difficult for even me to bring up. I was very much relieved, however, to learn that she was mostly pleased with the article and thanked us for acquainting the Skyline population with the situation in Louisiana.

Issue Two:

We were working on final touches of our paper one Thursday evening (to send to the publishers the next day) when the power went out, leaving us in the dark, and naturally, causing all work on the paper to cease. We could hear sirens and there was a rumor going around that a transformer (or was it a transistor?) had exploded at the airport. I remember frantically running around with some of the staff to get interviews and photos. The real story was that the power outage had caused a small fire in a motor located in Skyline’s automotive department, but no one was hurt and the fire was put out right away. Caught up in the excitement from the night, however, we ended up writing an overly dramatized headline, dangerously bordering on yellow journalism, “DARKNESS FALLS ON SKYLINE,” the newspaper screamed!

Issue Three:

Nothing extremely interesting happened in issue three, as I remember writing a very dull piece on the continuing construction. I do remember it was Thursday night, again the day before we send the paper out to the printers, when I remember watching our entertainment editor google pastry images for a dining review on the bakery Tart to Tart. We didn’t have any original photos and I couldn’t stand the thought of placing generic pastry photos in the piece, so together, we drove down to the place to take our own photographs. I will always feel a great sense of satisfaction in getting a genuine Tart to Tart pastry as opposed to a generic cookie.

Issue Four:

The front page photo of the author, Janice Mirikitani, from the Women on Writing conference, is a great photo. The only problem is that the photo looks as if Janice is crying, which to the best of a fellow staff member and I, we never saw her shed a tear.

Issue Five:

That issue of smoking…that dead horse that we keep on beating. Although made very trite, the issue of smoking is still one I feel very passionately about. I thoroughly enjoyed learning and covering the many sides of the issue in my story. I think the topic was actually a very interesting and valuable topic to discuss.

Issue Six:

This was the first issue published following our trip to our annual Journalism state convention and the McDonald’s cartoon that we ran just above the editorial won John Harrison his much deserved second place at the convention. Also around the time of this issue’s publication, Skyline College played host to a press conference initiated by state assembly member Leland Yee on protecting student’s right to free speech. It was a huge deal, very exciting, and my adviser and I each got to give speeches.

Issue Seven:

Student government elections that members of the newspaper staff didn’t even know about? How sad. When I spoke with the vice president and president of associated students, they were disappointed in the lack of student involvement. It seems everyone is too busy with other aspects of their lives to pay much attention to what goes on in the school.

Also in this issue, we somehow managed to print a letter in our Letters to the Editor section, a letter that was most likely spam. It was very sloppy of us and rather humiliating. Whoever sent the e-mail probably received more than they bargained for by getting published in The Skyline View…. Oh well, that’s something that will be sure not to happen again.

It has been a fun and interesting year full of many learning experiences, and I hope you have found my insight to be enlightening, whether you have any interest in journalism or not.