For those of you who have never visited the Herald office, you may not know that in order to get there, you must first climb 42 very creaky, wooden stairs.
The past two semesters of my college career have been spent trekking up those stairs almost daily, and while figuring out how on earth to say goodbye to a column I have enjoyed for almost seven semesters, I realized that these stairs have more significance than I ever could have imagined.
The stairs — much like the paper itself — can be daunting and intimidating at times. There are days when I truly think I won't make it up that staircase at all, let alone put my page to bed in just a few hours. Other days, when I swing open the glass door, the staircase looks like a piece of cake, and I skip every other step on my way up, looking forward to what lies ahead for the evening. These are the nights when everything fits perfectly on the page, the headlines are witty and the content strong. The range of experiences I've had while working at the Herald is exactly what made my job so challenging but also very, very rewarding.
When I began as a writer, I was absolutely terrified. I knew basically nobody in the office and my editor was older and a lot more talented. I knew that the red pen he marked all over the copy of my column was only to help me, but I couldn't help feeling that I would never be worthy of more than a few column inches.
This is when you'd expect me to say that after some hard work and some good, long hours spent in front of my computer screen, everything fell right into place. Well, you're wrong.
I've come to learn that things don't fall into place that easily, and sometimes they need a little extra push to get where they belong. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, and no matter what I did, angry readers would rip me apart in the comments. Sometimes I felt I deserved it, and readers showed me how I might have been wrong. But one night, the insults got so bad I called my editor and asked him what I was doing wrong.
What he told me that night, and what I have told other writers since, is that I wasn't doing anything wrong but rather was doing my job quite well. I had riled people up, ruffled some feathers and had people angry enough for them to take the time and comment on the website. And hey, at least I knew people were reading my column.
Since then, producing columns weekly hasn't become much easier, and the negative feedback is still hard to read. My inbox will occasionally flood with responses to my columns; a few of these e-mails have developed into interesting back-and-forth conversations, and a few I've read out loud to friends and have had a good laugh over. Criticism isn't easy to swallow, but neither is a silent readership. And knowing there will always be people scrutinizing my every word made me a more diligent and thoughtful writer.
Today, as I wrap up my second semester as one of the editorial page editors and a member of the Editorial Board, I realize the challenging days at the Herald were some of my hardest, but also some of my best. And, at the same time, some of the best days at the Herald were some of my best in college. I'm fairly certain — and I mean this with no disrespect to my professors — that I learned more about journalism and myself from working at the Herald than I did in many of my courses.
The Herald provided me with the opportunity to learn about a subject I never thought I would become so passionate about — Madison politics — and I was able to sit down with the mayor, aldermanic candidates and UW Chancellor John Wiley. I've sat on an Editorial Board with five other very talented students and have helped craft opinions about controversies ranging from ASM's lack of organization to the Kaplan debacle in the Law School to the unclear and confusing "holistic" UW admissions process.
In short, my tenure at the Herald has been a life-changing experience. My passion for journalism and writing has been fueled by the various challenges I've experienced here, and I am soon off to pursue journalism as a career. My last words to Herald readers are easy, but heartfelt: Thank you.
Emily Friedman ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism and legal studies. She would like to thank all of her editors past and present and her friends and family for their support.
