When I drive down Fort Street at 7 am, it’s light out now. It’s nice to know that even if the COVID situation isn’t changing, something is. Why, you may ask, am I driving around town at 7 am? Because it preserves my sanity if I leave the house before work, even if the place I come back to is the place I left 10 minutes before. That, and I need my morning espresso.
We’ve been an online-only (for now) student newspaper for just shy of a year, but I keep
“newspaper” in the unofficial title, and I keep the last issue we printed in my desk drawer. I keep memories of days with ink-stained fingers, sweaty brows after campus distribution, and, from when I was a little kid, having to wait a full 24 hours to soak up the day’s news.
In 1952, a tycoon named Rupert Murdoch inherited a chain of Australian papers and changed media forever. He incessantly vouched for the public’s right to know, even when it didn’t have to be a story. Murdoch was still a main player in media when Princess Diana died, in an incident infamously involving the press. That situation brought up lots of important questions for an editor to ask when working on a potentially damaging story: does this have to be a story? Does the disservice to the public in not writing it outweigh the potential damage it may cause?
Nexus started up in 1990. 30 years later, one of the two headlines on the front page of our last print issue to date brought those questions into my mind: “Camosun running Certified Medical Laboratory Assistant program without provincial accreditation.” The other headline, “Camosun cancels in-person classes for rest of semester,” serves as a grim reminder of what ended up happening over the coming year.
Not long after that issue was printed, the college told us they didn’t want printed copies on campus because of COVID-19-related concerns. With very few students on campus, it seemed pointless to argue.
When I look at the March 18, 2020 issue, the first though that comes into my head is, “It’s hard to go out of the print journalism world with more of a bang than that.” It was one of the most stressful issues we had ever put together in my time with Nexus, and not necessarily because of the looming pandemic. For me, it was also one of the most rewarding.
When I look back at that issue—which now has a few coffee stains, notes, and creases in the margins—I’m reminded of some of the esoteric ins and outs of printing a physical issue that we don’t have to think about while running a website: the stress of getting high-resolution photos; having a writer handling a big story going MIA at the last minute, leaving an empty space on the page; back-page ads. They’re things that are the thorn in the side of every print editor. But there are things we miss about printing, and hey, maybe we will print again.
But the workflow of running a website is going really well. Like so many things perpetuated by the COVID-19 crisis, the relevance of printing a newspaper was bound to come into question eventually, and was only sped up by COVID-19. But I’ll always fight for the importance of printing. When you hold a tangible object in front of you, it immediately bypasses the sometimes-ugly underbelly of the internet. Readers may even subconsciously hold a printed publication in higher regard than a website, but that one’s hard to say, because it depends on if you remember a world where print media was one of only three options for news consumption. Now, there are many options, but print will always be my favourite.
So I’ll hold that for-now-last issue of the paper close, but I won’t hang on too tight or crumble it up in my chest, because eventually it becomes time to let the past go. We’re witnessing yet another a change in the industry; for my part, I’ll keep asking the right questions—even if they’re sometimes directed at myself—because asking good questions is what makes good journalism.