When I took the position at the end of the spring semester, I had no idea what I was getting into.
At the time, I reminded myself that I have life experience on my side, having lived two years in a village in Togo, West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer. I have professional experience as well, having worked this summer at the Lexington Herald-Leader, a newspaper tied for 26th best in the country according to Columbia Journalism Review.
I also have common sense, I told myself, proven by the fact that I was wise enough to look up the word "ombudsman" in the dictionary before taking the position. Not only that, but I am also scholarly enough to be interested that the word comes from an Old Norse word, umbodsmadhr, which loosely translates to "administration-man."
So, I concluded, I will be a fine administration-man. I will administer journalistic integrity to the integrity-less, journalistic savvy to the non-savvy, and journalistic maturity to the immature. As it turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong (grammatically or otherwise).
Sitting at a long table of DTH editors during one of their daily meetings Sunday afternoon, I was confronted with the ugly truth. These people are twice as smart as me, four times as efficient, and eight years more mature than I was at their age. And they would never waste their time investigating the etymology of ombudsman.
An outsider might complain that their speech is littered with journalistic lingo, sounding like show-offs. But their purpose is not to impress; it is to produce a quality student newspaper. Not a weekly newspaper or a bi- or tri-weekly newspaper (as most colleges produce) but a daily newspaper, five times a week without fail. God knows, their class work suffers for it, but it is a price they are glad to pay.
They make editorial decisions about which story should run on the front page; one about legislative proposals to increase UNC tuition or one about delayed construction projects around campus. They decide what art will best illuminate a subject. They decide where to place a story on the page and how big a headline should be. And they do it all for you.
They nurture each story from its conception to its birth, always aware of the thin line that exists between hard-hitting journalism and gratuitously inflammatory rhetoric. They are the first and last line of defense in preventing libelous material from being printed.
How could I not be impressed? After all, they are a decade younger than me and hardly fazed by the prospect of setting an agenda for hundreds of thousands of students, faculty and community members.
