What happens in the Pitch office, stays in the Pitch office. Yes, that sort of, kind of, may be a confidentiality rule of ours, but in reality, nobody cares about what takes place here at The Pitch. That’s right, nobody cares. As a proud member of the Pitch staff/dedicated copy editor/future editor-in-chief of the online staff, I think it’s time that I tell you about what it takes to be a member of Pitch society. It’s a dirty job, but it’s got to be done. I present you, the day in the life of (dun . . . dun . . . dun . . . ), the Pitch staff.
When it’s that time of the month for us, when we get all moody and tired . . . you know . . . when The Pitch comes out, you never see us wearing puffy painted T-shirts or black paint under our eyes. While we editors sure have made a good effort to have some fun, coordinated spirit on publication dates, it just hasn’t worked. Yes, we’ve tried and tried the “make your own paper maché hat out of a Pitch day,” but it’s always failed. We’re actually too busy putting this newspaper together to make ourselves little triangular newspaper hats to wear when distributing papers to the school.
As for the puffy painted shirts, we’ve just encountered way too many problems with the “Ps” in “Pitch” coming out right. For some odd reason, they always seem to get smeared and look more like “Bs.” Hmm . . . And then, there’s paper-boy day. We’ve hopelessly attempted to make this spirit day work, but apparently, you’re not allowed to ride a tricycle in the hallway and throw piles of newspapers into classrooms. They say people don’t take you as a serious publication that way.
Now that we’ve exhausted our efforts to be just like the rest of the clubs and teams at WJ that can flash their spirit on “game days,” we’d like to ask for a bit more respect. Seriously, we put in hours and hours of work, and what do we get in return? Complaints. Letters to the editor. Nice little e-mails with snarky comments about our articles. How about some “thank you”s here and there?
Let me take you to a typical production week for us. Not only do we slowly make it to room 211 for our daily third period class, but we start camping out there after school for a fun little cram session that we like to call “press.” We have one night that goes until 7 p.m. or so, and then there’s “late night press.” By this night, it’s usually just editors, and we know it’s a bad sign when our advisor starts to warn us that we have to be out of the school at 10 p.m. Actually, it’s even worse when we figure out how to get around this and are there even later than 10! When the computers start saying, “hey loser, get off the school computer and go home,” you know it’s getting late.
As a copy editor, I letter-by-letter check every name printed in each issue for accurate spelling and make sure all students are identified as being in the right grade. The most brutal part of the job is definitely following style. In the journalism world, the Associated Press (AP) is God, and a copy editor’s bible is the AP Stylebook, where we look up every tidbit of formatting information for this paper. So when I want to see how the AP abbreviates a state’s name because we don’t use postal abbreviations, it’s time to look it up. “I love my job. I love my job. I love my job.” I just keep telling myself that. And it’s not like the other editors jobs are easy. For example, those masterpiece layouts they make . . . those take hours to piece together.
Hopefully you now see that The Pitch isn’t some easy-A class that we do for our college applications. The 2008-2009 Pitch staff actually worked really hard to deliver you an award-winning newspaper. So just realize, in order for you to be reading this, 30 of us spent the last week beating each other down with Tech Ed tools (yeah, probably not the best idea to put stressed out kids in a tech classroom that has woodworking equipment in it), eating nothing but cold pizza and scraps of food that we could find and if we’ve slept at all, it’s been on the 50-year-old couch that sits in the semi-claustrophobic Pitch office. You’re welcome.
