I had been saving some of the content of this column for my final column in this spring's graduation issue, but setting nostalgia aside, I think this week might be a more appropriate time to write about why working for The Cavalier Daily is unlike participation in any other student organization.
First and foremost, The Cavalier Daily is not a contracted independent organization. This is something that I have found myself explaining frequently in the last two-and-a-half years, often to the surprise of fellow students who assume we receive financial support from and work under the umbrella of the University. We do not. The tag line, "independent student newspaper," is not something we use just to spice up our title. Prudence dictated that we fully separated ourselves in the early 1980s, when it became clear that we could not remain under the scrutiny of the University's Media Board and also remain editorially independent.
Now I could spend a lot of time and page space telling you the institutional importance of an independent newspaper, but that can be easily found by anyone who googles the history of the CD.
Instead, I would rather talk about the side of the newspaper which is much less discussed - its individual staff members.
The fact that the newspaper stands alone means that most positions on our staff are not "like" a real job - they are a real job. The tasks of generating content, tracking down sources and providing the most accurate information to our readers falls solely on us. There is no safety net, no passing of the buck when things go wrong, and no one but us to take responsibility for what we choose to print.
In a lot of ways this is frightening. I remember when I began my first semester as life editor; I had a moment of queasy realization that I would be in charge of filling a blank page for an entire year. A blank page or a dropped or swapped article can become the stuff of nightmares when you think about the size of our readership and the high expectations that have been built for us in 122 years of publication.
And yet, this responsibility fosters the unique environment I mentioned above. It is the reason that working for The Cavalier Daily has been my most valuable experience at the University. The knowledge of what rests on our shoulders brings our staff together in a way I rarely see reflected in other organizations. True, we all do not always agree about the best content or style in which information should be presented - in fact I would not consider us to being doing our job properly if we didn't occasionally argue. But we never lose sight of our common goal in favor of our own personal ones. This need for compromise leaves no room for self-promotion within our staff. Even when I don't agree with changes made to my articles or decisions our staff makes, I am confident that they are made with the overall good of the paper in mind. The codependency necessary to churn out a product five days a week generates a high level of trust. We work together, or the paper just doesn't work - it's as simple as that.
This is the heart of what I like about the CD. True, many of our staffers join in the hopes of gaining experience to help them in the future, but resume-padding is not the agenda of those who go far in our organization. While we are charged with printing headlines, you will never see us taking steps just to find our names in them.
As a columnist who so often laments breakdowns of communication and the ever dwindling number of straight-shooters in today's world, I am proud to be a part of an organization in which I never have to doubt the motives of my fellow members. We work in the best interest of an honest newspaper, always.
Katie's column runs biweekly Tuesdays. She can be reached at k.mcnally@cavalierdaily.com.
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