Black and white and red all over: A postcard from a college newsroom

My official title: copy chief. More honestly, I am simply your fourth grade teacher's dreaded red pen, personified. Here at this campus daily, I am the last defense between the incorrectly-placed apostrophe and the newsstand. I am also the one most likely to try to sneak an obscure pun into the headline of the editorial, just to see if I can get away with it.

I've been sitting in this black desk chair for seven hours, opening, clicking, changing, deleting, switching around. This work is repetitive and mind-numbing and oddly comforting all at once. We've passed through the traditionally punchy part of the evening, when everyone's blood sugar is high and Subway wrappers litter the desks, and entered the long, slow descent toward midnight.

The coffee shop downstairs closed half an hour ago. We're on our own from here.

The featured story on the front page tomorrow is about one local vegan restaurant (represented by a cow dressed in a broccoli bikini) losing its lease and being replaced by another local vegan restaurant (represented by a one-eyed, grinning Saturn). This is a story with weight. People are up in arms about it. This fact alone tells you almost everything you need to know about the city where I live.

Sometime after ten, the editor in chief demonstrates her patented Monty Python-esque Silly Walk for the design staff. "I usually follow that up with my African dictator laugh," she says. (O captain my captain!)

Slowly, even the late stories come in. Facts are checked, headlines are written. As always, we cannot find where the sports photos' captions have been saved, and an improvisational panic ensues. Tomorrow morning there will be eight pages of carefully-written news and sports, freshly printed and waiting for the campus to wake and read. There will be two columns, one editorial, briefs about a lecture and a candidate for dean and a suicide. There will be ads and horoscopes and photos and a cartoon about ATM PIN numbers.

And mostly, people will be excited about the wonderword and the sudoku.

But whenever we feel as though our long hours are mainly for the benefit of the faculty of the journalism school or our would-be-investigative-reporter navel-gazing, we remember our brethren in the global media, and take heart that if not here, if not today, then somewhere someone is producing work that makes a difference.

For you see, just this evening, the graphic designer found a video online in which a man has sex with a chicken.

And somehow, that makes everything make less sense in an astonishingly comforting way.