Column: Come work at The Daily Tar Heel

Y ou may have noticed something was a little off with our paper Thursday.

A few bylines were missing from the front page. Some of our stories clearly didn’t fit the spaces made for them by our design team. We had funky fonts in the middle of articles.

And I want to apologize, reader. Obviously, we didn’t fulfill our commitment to provide you with a top-quality paper.

I want to say that it won’t happen again ­— but I can’t promise that. In a newspaper managed by stressed-out 20-year-olds, there will be typos. And corrections. Our weather jokes might not be that funny.

So all this is to say that we would love to have you come work with us. We’re hiring people for our talented writing, design, photography and copy editing desks.

When you apply to work at The Daily Tar Heel, there are things we’ll tell you and things we won’t.

We’ll tell you that you’re responsible for contributing to the daily content of the paper at least once a week. We’ll tell you that you’ll be a representative of one of the country’s top college newspapers. We’ll tell you that your stories and photos and copy edits and graphics will be seen by thousands of readers across Orange County.

We won’t tell you that sometimes you’ll call a source, and he’ll be helping his cow give birth to a calf that will be named after you. (The calf later died.)

We’ll forget to mention that you might have to stop editing your story with an editor and help them find an appropriate bottom quote for the front page.

No one tells your friends that they’ll have to start being careful about what they say around you — it might show up on our front page the next day.

No one tells you that instead of celebrating Halloween and basketball wins against Duke on Franklin Street, you’ll be celebrating in our office on East Rosemary Street, hammering out a breaking story before deadline about the festivities you’re missing.

You’ll learn about 3-and-3’s and front packs. You’ll grow to hate meeting stories until you go to that one where a fight breaks out. You will admire your assistant editors and inspire your readers.

We’ll tell you this, but it won’t sink in until you’re in this office. You will get the chance to work with a team of writers and photographers who produce groundbreaking content. You will learn from the best college journalists in the country. You will have a blast.

My management team doesn’t let me use the words “sucked in” in front of potential applicants. But I don’t know a soul in this office who hasn’t fallen in love with this place. We won’t tell you you’ll get sucked in, but you will.

Above all, you’ll become obsessed with reading a newspaper that is every bit as defiant and passionate as the campus that pushed a centuries-old university to release a 60-page revision of its sexual assault and misconduct policy this week.

So if you noticed something was a little off with our paper Thursday, we would love to have you come work with us. Applications are due at 4 p.m.