Dear Reader,
A friend, a fellow at NPR, recently recounted a morning when six journalists had to look over a sentence they’d written before it could air. That number made us smile. You can’t publish a word in The Argus without seven people reading it first.
Increasingly, it feels like we’ve become focused on product over process, conclusion over confusion, result over reckoning. Our world’s investments in AI might promise a reduction in mundane work (robotronic inbox clearance! Defenestrate your spam!), but what follows, we fear, is a loss of the voluntary, collaborative, and human decisions behind every good system.
Should we accept this premise? At The Argus, we’ve remained as committed to process as to product. Twice-weekly, our production nights regularly run nine hours: New writers work in-person with senior editors; the Copy Department debates the validity of a comma; the layout editor grabs hold of the aux, and a midnight dance party might occur, depending on the editor’s music tastes. The process can also be slow and frustrating and tedious, but it is in those moments of depth that the importance of this work, the pace itself, shines through. In a work culture that prizes efficiency, how often do you get to linger with a sentence for an hour? To write and rewrite a headline until it fits? To care for one word against another?
Journalism has always been about this “business of caring,” as sports writer Roger Angell wrote. This organization, run almost entirely by unpaid 20-year-old volunteers (62 of them, next semester!), still cares a whole awful lot.
This semester, The Argus has had to navigate the increasingly repressive Trump administration with care. International student members of The Argus, who work as invaluable editors, managers, and contributors, have turned down assignments and asked for their bylines to be removed from written works for fear of government retaliation. Students, both international and domestic, have voiced legitimate concerns about writing pieces critical of the Trump administration, and former Argus contributors have requested that past political opinions be removed from the newspaper’s online archive. On Oct. 15, The Argus joined 54 other college newspapers in signing an amicus brief supporting the Stanford Daily’s lawsuit against the Trump administration; you can read our rationale for the decision here.
In the midst of a national crackdown on newspapers, both student and professionally run, our staff published 21 editions of The Argus. Our News team delivered rigorous coverage and investigations of campus protest, University policy, and the impacts of the Trump administration on Wesleyan. Our Features section wrote diverse profiles of campus partnerships, WesCelebs, Greek life, and trolley systems. Our Arts & Culture writers covered innovative student theater, literary magazines, and hard-working ballet dancers. The Sports section interviewed award-winning athletes, wrote about Hollywood endings and last-second heroics, and covered record-breaking seasons. Our Opinion team edited passionate repudiations of the University’s drinking game ban, detailed essays on the United States’ political state, and brought back the sex column.
That’s to say nothing of our Ampersand, Comics, and Puzzles sections, who populated our print editions with cross-words and cartoons, and our devoted Copy and Layout teams. And not all of the progress happened within the newsroom—nearly a dozen masthead members helped launch a weekly newsletter, install over a dozen newsstands on campus, revamp our social media, and work to make our website more attractive and functional.
All of The Argus’ sections, from the finance team to the archivists, brought on first-time contributors this semester, totalling 35 new contributors (21 of whom became staff writers, with three or more contributions). They helped us publish 266 articles this fall. Of the roughly 315,000 words we published, we know of only two that were misspelled.
In a time where fear and apathy feel, paradoxically, equally pernicious, we turned to faculty for a wiser, broader perspective through our Letters on Pragmatic Hope. Their writing reminds us that our societies have felt scared and worried before, but that we can, and must, continue to make changes—internally and externally. Even today, Professors told us, students are increasingly turning towards meaningful beauty. (Wesleyan’s music department, Dean of Arts and Humanities Roger Grant notes, has more enrollments than almost any other department on campus.)
It’s a pessimistic time to be a 20-something-year-old. It’s a pessimistic time to be any years old. But it has been a gift to spend time with so many people who still believe so deeply in community, storytelling, accountability, and the pursuit of beauty and truth.
Right now, our words live somewhere in transit: between copy editor and layout designer, WordPress and InDesign. They live in process, where a whole bunch of people have spent their Monday nights writing and rewriting, collectively converging upon something never quite finished.
We are quite sad our semesters as editors are drawing to a close. You can doubt us (see nine hour productions), but it’s been deeply inspiring to understand this paper from article inception to print publication. We are, however, incredibly excited to welcome next semester’s Editors-in-Chief, Janhavi Munde ’27 and Peyton De Winter ’27, who currently serve as The Argus’ Managing Editor and Production Manager. They will be joined by incoming Managing Editor Raiza Goel ’28, one of our current news editors. We have absolute confidence in their leadership, and we’re so excited to see the direction in which they take this paper.
While we write, these words live on a screen. To celebrate our final edition, in the morning, we will wake up at 7 a.m. and drive to the printing press and stand among the machines that toil and twist and turn these bits of binary into the ink in your hands.
That’s amazing, isn’t it? That people still get to do this? As long as there are people to interview and paper in this world, we know that the dozens of Wesleyan students who make this paper run will continue to make the biweekly, downhill walk to our 45 Broad St. office.
With gratitude,
Thomas Lyons & Miles Pinsof-Berlowitz
Editors-in-Chief
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