From my days of stapling my middle-school newsletter together, I have known journalism matters to me. It matters like it matters that my head is not below water when I take my next breath. This is not to say that I have ever, before now, been able to pinpoint why.

Maybe putting in late nights editing my high school newspaper (more of a peppy monthly leaflet) was a misguided attempt to pass time. I’ve always marveled at the romantic conception of the 1920s journalist sitting in a smoky café; one of my fleeting justifications for my passion could be writing under such auspices. But as a teen, I certainly was not in the place of Emile Zola to change society’s collective thought process, nor was I some miniature feminine Hemingway, chiseling out new boundaries for literary forms.

Early in college, I thought that by reporting I was trying to trace the footsteps of my grandfather, a magazine editor/airplane navigator/everything good in my wide-eyed little-girl world. But I hear he almost got kicked out of a UW class taught by Sinclair Lewis. Now in college, I know I am making my own way, not his.

Even the temporary glory of seeing a front-page byline has faded now that I am preparing to graduate.

Then why do I really, truly not mind when the printer calls the Herald at 3 a.m. wondering where our news pages are and the computer crashes and the headlines suck and I still have no idea what a “postscript error” is or how to use layers, which I apparently have to do before the paper can be sent, much less before I can go to bed?

I can justify the past two years of my life with one simple equation: Journalism matters, thus, The Badger Herald matters.

Sure, there is more than that. I am not seeking to downplay the deep bonds (and intimacies and rifts and scars) that working so closely with such an intelligent group of other devoted, learning college students has meant to me, but we do not make the paper for ourselves, and we know it.

Everything that goes into the Herald (sans random shout-outs, possibly) is meant to contribute to what’s going on at UW, in Madison and in any given student’s life. It’s a microcosm of the mass media that reaches the American public, essentially. Maybe that’s all basic, but that’s what gets forgotten.

Writers grow into reporters, the best of whom become watchdogs for regular citizens who would not otherwise have a voice. In the big picture, one thinks of the underrepresented as those without power: the young, the poor, the uneducated and any non-majority. In our Isthmus-bound microcosm, the scene might be different. But being able to write anything, anytime, and see it published on the Opinion page of the Herald is an important asset to students.

And having another student ? a reporter ? advocating your right to tell your story when the university isn’t, like several incidents involving discrimination against university housing employees this year, should be seen as a right, not a happenchance occurrence or luxury, if it is one. One can talk all day about the activist history of UW, but without the ability to speak freely, students lose the rights they hold most dear.

I have to say, I kind of loved it when the Herald was protested more than a year ago for running a racially and historically offensive advertisement. I couldn’t have disagreed more with the ad, but the fact that students were willing to demonstrate the degree of skepticism in the media to burn newspapers and scream their opinions was frankly beautiful: beautiful in the way that UW sends two busloads of activists to anti-war protests in D.C.

It’s not that I wasn’t scared, didn’t felt threatened or didn’t doubt the medium I worked for, but that I realized in that moment that it is my skepticism in the media to which I can attribute my ultimate faith in it.

What is an American without civil liberties? I’m not going into a rant on crazy, flag-waving, name-calling, evil-deeming freedom-yanking Bush here (just recall any past Harbath or Cullen columns you are still fuming about and imagine I have said the opposite), but it honestly scares me that post-Sept. 11 security measures are narrowing the ability of the media to serve the public. It looks as if Wisconsin’s open-records law will restrict more access to government information by the end of this legislative session, thanks to state manufacturing groups. Similarly, it blows my mind that journalists are some of the only citizens advocating for the Sept. 11 detainees’ rights.

The Badger Herald may not be a shining beacon on which the First Amendment rests, but instead, it has always been one of hundreds of underpinnings. It is one that students here have the power to strengthen. As I move on from my years at the Herald, I do so securely, knowing this sentiment is one of those this paper was founded upon, knowing it will sustain itself.

It is the dedicated, smart people who have surrounded me in the past two years who taught me that every journalist — especially those in our microcosmic world, from the freshman writing about ASM to the philosophizing editor in chief — is fundamental to this democratic society. Day-to-day newsprint musings may seem trite, but our place in the big picture is clear.

I am as certain of that as I am of my next breath of air.