So many times throughout my time with The Daily Tar Heel, specifically during my year-long tenure as an assistant sports editor when I was a junior, I was asked this question: “Why do you still work for the DTH?”
It’s a legitimate question, I think. And to be honest, I’m not sure I ever had an adequate answer at the ready.
After all — I'm just going to say it — working for the DTH was tough.
The work felt unrewarding at times, like when a clip that I’d spent days stressing over didn’t receive the attention I wanted it to, or when I’d champion a long day editing and managing at the office only to enter the library post-midnight to grind on other schoolwork.
The work felt misunderstood at times, too — as if the voices us student journalists offered were dismissed as non-essential parts of this paradoxically forever young and forever old Chapel Hill community.
But these shortcomings aren't what stick with me now, as I'm trying to write my last piece for this special publication.
Instead, similar to me summing up my entire college experience, what comes immediately to mind are answers too perfect and too easy for them to be fully true. And I could tell you about all of them.
I could tell you that the people made my time at the DTH special. I could cite the times my former co-assistant editor James Tatter and I went to He’s Not Here after our philosophy class every Tuesday evening this semester, and how in that time we’d talk about everything and nothing over blue cups.
I could tell you about the times when former sports editor Chapel Fowler, Tatter and I connected over feeling in over our heads about having to lead a sports desk during a time when the future of the DTH was in question. I could recount the memories I have of me, Fowler, Chris Hilburn-Trenkle, Jack Frederick and other DTH editors sitting around the office, talking to each other in what seemed like our own language — as if only those who understood the work we put in each week could decode how we were actually feeling.
