I don't know if you've heard, but newspapers are dying.
This statement is in vogue right now at magazines, blogs and, well, newspapers. I can't tell you how true it is, but every time I hear it, my heart twinges.
Facing an industry where budget cuts and massive waves of layoffs are announced every few months, few sane young people are looking to jump into the newspaper business. Out of all the Chronicle staffers I've worked with, none have graduated to work at a newspaper. Newspapers may be devising all sorts of strategies to save themselves, but if smart, eager, young journalists graduate from college and start looking for jobs anywhere but in a newsroom, what kind of future can the industry have?
So my heart twinges because I love newspapers.
They're the second item on my artfully randomized list of Facebook interests. My father is a tenured journalism professor. I'm pretty sure if my landlord decided to cut off power to my apartment, my roommates and I could make it through the winter by burning the stacks of discarded back issues in my room.
Appropriately, I've found a second home at Duke in the third-floor warren of The Chronicle office. When I think about my four years here, the memories that come to mind will be colored with harsh fluorescent lighting, the constant hum of computers and the smell of stale cheap beer.
Giving up innumerable hours of my "undergraduate experience," a few tenths of my GPA and at least one trip to Africa means I get a black and white picture and 700 words with which to pass on the wisdom I've gleaned here.
Working at a daily paper means there's rarely time for looking in the rearview mirror. Before the "dead tree" version of The Chronicle has hit newsstands and all the Sudoku boxes have been filled in, reporters are already working on tomorrow's edition. Forget "the Tower of Campus Thought and Action," The Chronicle should swipe Scarlett O'Hara's motto.
At the paper, tomorrow is always another day, and whether it's an embarrassing typo or an investigative story that took three weeks, few things evade the mixed-media recycling bin.
Luckily, the experiences I really want to hold on to can't be recycled. I have developed impeccable phone manners. I can navigate downtown Durham using the county jail as a landmark. I've made so many close friends from working at the paper that President Brodhead called me out on it last week.
I've also had the opportunity to interview a soldier recovering from injuries sustained in a roadside bombing in Iraq, challenge administrators when they're being evasive and decide what stories should be at the forefront of campus discussion.
Of course, everything has its ups and downs, and like any cliché more stale than the aforementioned beer, there's a ring of truth to this one.
Google my name and the sixth result that pops up is a comment on a Daily Tar Heel message board. An intrepid Tar Heel reader cut and pasted part of an article I wrote my junior fall about the lacrosse case. Above the excerpt he or she wrote, "Saidi Chen, is barely literate in English so I have corrected her politically incorrect Chinese Military-Industrial-Complex grammar."
I could point out that this is a slight to the Wisconsin public school system and my New England prep school. Or that grammar can't really be politically correct or incorrect. But I think I'll just note that thanks to the Internet, some things do last forever.
This column is just one more thing in a long line of lasts that I'll have to face in the next few weeks. Some lasts are good-the last time I will fruitlessly lap the Great Hall in search of something appetizing. And some lasts will make me wistful-the last time I'll hear the Chapel bells mark the end of the day. But it won't be until my last time descending the stairs from 301 Flowers that it'll really hit me: I'm graduating. Thanks Duke, it's been swell.
Saidi Chen is a Trinity senior. She was news editor and university editor for The Chronicle.
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