Enter, if you dare …
October 23rd, 2010 by Stephanie Vermillion
This past Saturday, while the rest of campus was sleeping off their Friday night festivities, your faithful, devoted Flyer News staff was learning how to serve you better, even if it meant developing hypothermia.
As a group we met at 9:10 a.m. and drove on down to Dr. Lain’s house for a six hour annual staff bonding session. Now, for those of you who have had DL for his copyediting class and think his only food selection is fire and brimstone, his house lined with barbwire and front lawn protected by Spike – half wolf, half dog – thrashing apart outdated AP Stylebooks, you’re actually only half accurate.
Yes, there was fire – but that was from the grill for our afternoon feast. And yes, there was thrashing – but it was hungry college students ripping apart donut boxes, not stylebooks. As scary as the idea of a Saturday at DL’s house may seem, it actually is one of the most important parts of the year for Flyer News.
It’s rare that we’re all together without the stress of a dropped story or the agony of a crashing Y drive, where we can talk about who we are both as individual staff members and as a group ourselves. DL forces us to think outside of the job descriptions we hold and brainstorm how we can be the best to our ability.
At 9:30 a.m. we arrived in nothing short of shivering shambles, hoping we could survive our grogginess and lack of blankets for the outdoor, six-hour bonding experience. But as we left at 3 p.m., after learning about each other, our role as Flyer News on campus and hearing Scott Elliot, a Dayton Daily News editor, give us the low down on surviving in the journalism industry today, we left with a lot to think about.
If we want to make the paper the best it can be, we have to keep trying all of the new things we started this year and keep up with new technology. I know I personally left Saturday with a whole list of ideas on how to make my section better overall.
And while I realize that my crazy ideas are more often miss than hit, every once in awhile they somehow turn out golden, so I keep going on trying. Because seriously, what media analyst would have foretold “Who runs a 5k in a fat suit?” would be the video to hit the jack pot? Actually, that’s 542 hits to be exact.
