Get Herald RSSI took me a really long time to get used to the idea that the people who ran The Herald weren't robots. Both my parents are newspaper editors, and I learned from a very early age that working for a real newspaper is maddeningly stressful. It's the same thing for a student newspaper, I imagined, except you don't get paid, and half of your time is spent trying to recruit other people to fill your shoes. How, I wondered, do writers survive this process without picking up the nearest cordless drill, pressing it to their temples and not stopping 'til the walls are splattered with chunks of skull? Aside from the fact that sharp objects at the Herald are hidden, I think it's because, like some variation of the Stockholm Syndrome, we manage to tell ourselves that our work is really "fun."
When I started writing for the Herald, I initially only wanted to write movie reviews. That's all - an occasional review when there was a chance to see something good for free. I was convinced that I wasn't "really" a part of The Herald, because Post- (the arts and culture magazine) has its own editorial mandate (or rather, doesn't), and Post- editors don't really talk to anyone other than themselves.
And then overnight I was suddenly promoted to the executive editor position, which turned out to be a veritable tar baby of overlapping, incompatible responsibilities. On any given issue I was a quasi-layout editor, ego-massager, staff writer, muse and pornographer. I'd usually stumble home after work at 3 a.m., the realization creeping on me that I had two ten-page papers due by 9 a.m.
Post- always seemed like the most malnourished publication on earth, chronically understaffed and plagued by technical glitches that would ground the creative process to a halt. Trying to use Quark on a broken iMac, I've learned, is the technological equivalent of painting the Mona Lisa on a postage stamp with a crayon nub.
To ease the stress, we'd entertain ourselves trying to see how many snotty cultural references we could fit inside inflammatory political diatribes. We eventually maxed out around our fifth issue, when we integrated awkward references to episodes of the Cosby Show in our scathing critique of Paul Wolfowitz's letter to the editor in the National Review. "Wolfowitz, with his infantile ignorance of the international community's limited appreciation for cloak-and-dagger politics," we wrote, "might as well be Tempestt Bledsoe, blithely talking on the phone with a friend, oblivious to the fact that there's a stern Phylicia Rashad outside her bedroom door, demanding that she come to dinner." There were times, I admit, when we were too clever for our own good.
But most of the time we wrote good shit.
In retrospect, the Herald was like an aboriginal walkabout. We were forlorn children in the wilderness, forbidden to re-enter society until we'd cultivated a more profound sense of our being. In this case, I came away knowing that I loved writing and wanting to do this professionally. I'm about to start a new career as an editorial assistant for a civil-rights attorney in Cambridge, working on a civil rights-themed radio program as well as editorial columns and letters to the editor in various publications. I'm blessed that I found a job that utilizes many of the same skills I developed at the Herald, and one that relates just as strongly to the society I've been exploring for the past four years of my life. My job may have been a tar baby, but I was really working in the briars' patch, where I belonged.
Dan Poulson '04 was executive editor of Post- Magazine.
