Hello dearest readers,
As I remain behind after our very last Paw Print class, I feel the adrenaline that Laura’s room gives me dissipating out of my body. This should be a good feeling. There’s no more pieces to edit, and edit again and fix and publish and update and push and post. No more hard conversations about integrity or the oxford comma. I should be filled with joy for this stressful extracurricular that takes up such an extreme amount of time that was not adequately represented on my CommonApp activities list.
So, I should be happy. I’m free!
But, instead, I (and Cecily too, I believe) am filled with sadness. This year was so meaningful to us, and we cannot thank you all for putting your trust in us to accurately (usually) and skillfully (rarely) report the news, the student perspective and the weird things about this community.
I hope you enjoyed this year of the Paw Print’s revival. We published everything from controversial, thought-provoking pieces to comics about Korra–the latter of which was entirely more popular and skilled. And, plus, also, we collectively convinced 12 freshmen that the Oxford comma is bad, even though we use it consistently.
Thank you for dealing with eight months of passive aggressive emails, misspelled and mistaken names and unfortunately chosen photos.
To our staff:
We love you. Thank you for making our jobs harder, it allowed our characters to grow. We apologize for the frankly confusing and often rude Google comments on your pieces–we mean no harm. We are so proud of how much everyone has grown and the fact that some of you came in here not knowing how to write an article, and about half of those people now can. Sort of.
You all are the reason that we love to go to Paw Print. Yes, of course, we loved the ego boost of telling all of you writers that you are wrong at various points in time. But we also loved how proud we got to be of all of you. Every single person pitched, and interviewed, and wrote, and edited, and wrote, and fixed, and edited and freaking published.
Whether you had a hundred readers or three (two of which were probably Cecily’s mom), you are amazingly cool and have done something that many will never do: been on a chaotic, loud, slightly demeaning school newspaper staff.
We were honored to be your editors-in-chief, and consistently and delightfully inspired (flabbergasted) to hear your pitches, fix your grammar and get only a little mad about your missed deadlines. Again, we love you. We will spend the next four years reading all of MOST of at least a few of your pieces and living vicariously through you.
To Laura:
We can’t thank you enough for putting up with us. You gentle-parented the heck out of us. Thank you for telling us when we were being mean and doing so quite bluntly. We needed that. The Paw Print would not be here now without you, and we truly believe that with your unhinged leadership style, it will only continue to grow. I hope you feel proud of everything that the paper has become, and we hope you stay true to the goofy and unprofessional roots that make the Paw Print the place that it is. You are truly a mentor to so many students, and we wouldn’t have the support or comfort necessary to write without you. I hope next year you will fulfill your dream and full potential by becoming the Paw Print’s sole gossip columnist. Thank you for pushing us and for teaching us that there are more ways and reasons to write than a nine-page history paper. We will miss your wonderful pitching chair, the floof that Ashlynn Dexter is far too attached to, the public shaming and the looksmaxxing.
To everyone:
We hope you cherish all of the pieces we’ve published this year, and then promptly disregard them when the younger, hotter versions of ourselves reduce us to irrelevance.
Thank you!
Your Editors-in-Chief,
Cecily and Mikaela
