By Gopika Nair, Editor-in-Chief
Alongside an Everest of newspapers sits a magenta booklet on my parentsâ coffee table back home. The booklet is a compilation of articles my dad wrote for his weekly column âPuff Pastryâ when he was a 30-something, mustache-sporting journalist with a Walkman.
The booklet emerges only when my parents are in the middle of a spring cleaning extravaganza. Perhaps to abate my cleaning-induced griping, my mom would hand me the collection of articles when I was younger, often accompanied by the words, âYour father writes about you in many of his stories.â
Either I was too young to understand my dadâs words or too trapped in a solipsistic teenage bubble to appreciate it, because I donât remember the stories having an impact on me until recently.
As my mom was heading to bed a little after midnight on New Yearâs, she found the booklet in a box sheâd unpacked. âYou can get inspired,â she said this time.
Indeed, poring over my dadâs words as a listless 20-year-old at 3 a.m. sparked something that wasnât just inspiration but also a renewed fervor for journalism.
The Transcript staff expends a considerable amount of energy and time on this publication, even though we, frankly, miss the mark sometimes (actually, according to Paul Kostyuâs critiques of our print editions, we miss the mark a lot).
So, itâs pretty easy to feel drained.
Ask any editor who was a part of The Transcript in 2016 and theyâll probably tell you this paper has been their greatest source of frustration. But maybe, theyâll also tell you itâs been a great source of joy.
Weâve designed pages until 5 a.m., written stories long after our brains had turned into mush, neglected schoolwork, fallen asleep in The Transcript office and we continued to do it all over again every other week.
Iâm not going to pretend our commitment to the paper was born solely out of our passion for journalism; weâve all thought about quitting at one point or another and sometimes, the only thing that kept us in The Transcript office until the wee hours of the morning was our obligations.
But ultimately, all those sleepless nights spent working in The Transcript office proved to be rewarding. The field of journalism isnât a platform for self-indulgent writers (barring op-eds and columns), and thatâs exactly why I respect it.
We, as editors, can (and do often) grumble about the hours we spend designing pages and writing stories only to yield mediocre results in the end. But journalism supersedes us and our petty complaints. We donât matter; what we do is about everyone else.
The Transcript, in particular, has been memorializing the Ohio Wesleyan community since 1867 through news articles that pertains to the campus.
Over the years, weâve covered theatre and dance productions, lectures sponsored by various departments, club events, notable achievements, the student government and faculty meetings to bridge any gap that might be created by lack of transparency. We continue to devote our energy to exactly that.
The Transcript will celebrate its 150th anniversary Oct. 1, 2017. Before then, my aim is to improve the overall quality of The Transcript. Iâm prepared for the all-nighters ahead of me and the gray hairs Iâm inevitably going to find by the end of my term as editor-in-chief. Iâm prepared for the highs of working with and learning from the new editorial staff and the lows of egregious typos we wonât catch. Iâm prepared for failures and successes and more failures. Iâm prepared for everything that might come The Transcriptâs way because as much as this paper has been the greatest source of frustration in my life, itâs also given me the most joy.