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Marilee Lorusso archives

Jillian Peña
Editorial Director

It’s 12:30 a.m. and I’m wide awake with my Starbucks grande, non fat white chocolate mocha sitting next to me. My fingers are going a mile minute as I write my breaking story that needs to go into the paper tomorrow.

Once I finish everything I need to get done for tomorrow it will be 4 a.m. I’ll sleep for four hours and then I’ll be up again and on the go. Half of my day will be spent in the Campus Times newsroom with another type of coffee in hand.

I’ll sit with my fellow editors and staff writers and laugh as we come up with some ridiculous headlines, talk about the crappy weather and complain about how slow the Web server is.

I must admit that even though it can be a hectic and stressful job I am really beginning to enjoy it.

There is a certain camaraderie in the newsroom that is hard to find elsewhere. We understand one another, no matter how different we all are.

When I walk into the newsroom with bags under my eyes they all know that after a long day of going to class, doing homework, trying to maintain a social life and then attending the event that I need to cover, the last thing I wanted to do was sit in front of my computer and hammer out a 600-word story.

Now if the paper was the only thing we did everyday – no classes, no homework, no extracurricular activities – it would be great. We’d have the time we needed to get our stories in by deadline.

I know what you are thinking “It’s only a weekly paper,” but you have no idea the time and effort that goes into putting it together.

We spend at least six hours in actual production, not to mention the time it takes to actually write and edit your stories. And all for only two units!

Sometimes I have to remind myself that all the running around, scrambling to meet deadlines and the late nights are okay.

They are okay because I love it. I know it sounds crazy but it is all worth it when I get to see my writing in print.

The strangest part about it is I know that I’m not the only one who feels this way.

The students who hang out in the ACB know exactly what I mean.

For some, they enjoy hearing their voices on the radio, others get all giddy when they see themselves on TV, and the peeps upstairs loving seeing their artwork take shape.

It is our way of getting our voices heard when we feel stuck in a world where everything else drowns us out.

Writing is my salvation, my only true release. I feel vindicated when someone comes up to me and tells me they read my last story and they really enjoyed it.

In some way I feel like I touched their lives. It even brings a smile to my face when people tell me they hated my latest story or column. I often get accused of being too harsh, but that’s all right with me because that is a part of the voice I have developed.

Who cares if they didn’t like it; at least they took the time to read it.

When I write I leave a part of myself on the paper, I have a sense of pride for my work every time I read back over it, (even if it happened to suck) it is like I go back to that moment when I was writing it and I can remember exactly what I was going through at the time.

Writing is my version of a time capsule just waiting to be opened at some future date just so I can see how much I’ve grown and how the world has changed.

Maybe that’s why I love the newsroom so much because everyone in it understands exactly where I’m coming from.

Jillian Peña, a sophomore communications major, is editorial director of the Campus Times. She can be reached by e-mail at jpena2@ulv.edu.