Installment+23

South of Denver - Chapter 23 September 17, 2005

It's 9:45 p.m. last Monday night. The paper is due, in fact, past due. We've been struggling with finalizing the first issue of the year since school ended at 2:32, and everyone's feeling a little strung out.

I casually look at a printout of page 2, and notice that the cutline doesn't seem finished.

"Hey, Megan! Who is this girl in the 'Miracle Worker' cutline? She isn't identified."

"I don't know her name," she replies, eyes characteristically wide and mouth perpetually smiling. "Seriously. No one knows her name."

Megan is an understudy in the play, and she doesn't know the name of one of the two leads? She knows she is a freshman, but that's it. Six phone calls to other staff members result in no additional information. By this point I'm just shaking my head.

"I think her name is Kaitlin," Megan finally says. And that is what we ended up running in the cutline - identifying the girl playing Annie Sullivan correctly and the freshman playing Helen Keller as "Kaitlin '09." What were we supposed to do, delay the paper an entire day for this name? I considered it for a moment, and then just decided to apologize to the (evidently) obscure freshman.

Her actual first name turned out to be Kathryn.

I had asked Megan if anyone in the play ever talked to one another. Chelsea overheard and said, "Hey, she's Helen Keller. She's not supposed to talk!"

Unfortunately, that was not nearly the only error in issue one. One of my favorites was when Susie, editing the news pages, somehow cut and pasted incorrectly and included a quote on the newly formed Equestrian Club in the Culinary Club brief. Since she was running so far behind, no one on staff had a chance to even glance over the page before it was whisked away through the miracle of PDFs and FTP.

The mix-up was crystal clear, of course, when we began actually reading the paper Wednesday morning, just after distribution. But once the paper is out, really the only thing to do is just laugh. I mentioned that I would be reluctant to taste any Culinary Club cuisine since they were apparently using Grade A horseflesh.

And there were more: About a sophomore girl who had just moved here over the summer from New Orleans, we wrote: "Perkins has grown up in New Orleans her entire life."

In our hallway fashion diagram, we noted that a girl was wearing a $5 "neckless."

The style and grammar errors were so numerous that my marked up copy of the paper looked like it had been drenched in red ink.

On Wednesday, during fourth hour, as I was ranting to my introductory journalism class about all the errors, and the importance of at least being accurate, even if we aren't exactly inspired, Melissa, a bright junior, said, "You should lighten up. No one except you even notices all those mistakes."

If that's true, I thought to myself later, then that's even sadder than our lack of editing. When the staff met on Thursday, I asked all of them to answer honestly this question: "Were the errors in style and grammar due to us having no idea they were errors, or were they due to us not being organized enough to actually proof the pages?"

To a person, they said they simply ran out of time, and they needed to work on organization and meeting all deadlines.

Issue one was exciting and scary and sloppy and chaotic and fun and embarrassing. Most importantly, it's over.

By Friday we were filling the white board with great ideas for coverage -- for story-telling -- in the October issue. The wackiness of September can be a distant memory, if we get it together.

Somebody even suggested we might do some sort of wrap up on the fall play, which closes the weekend before issue two. "Despite being so obscure that even the school newspaper didn't know her name, Kathryn Sislow '09, proved a freshman actress with no lines could make an audience laugh and cry."

Jack Kennedy

Rock Canyon High School

Highlands Ranch CO 80124

 jkkennedy@comcast.net

 jack.kennedy@dcsdk12.org

Note: This is the latest chapter in a series of columns on working with a young staff in a young school (8 of the 11 staff are sophomores and no senior class yet). It is cryptotherapy for me. It may occasionally provide something positive for you. Please go to the JEAHELP archives to read the previous chapters if you missed them and have absolutely nothing else to do.