Photo by Abigail Clarkin
Getting the proverbial keys to the Good Five Cent Cigar was pretty daunting. Here I am, a junior writing & rhetoric and English major, who now has control of 47-year-old newspaper. Needless to say, I felt very unqualified and unfit for this position.
But after a month of throwing away failed designs, crumpling up mediocre ideas and spending hours tediously planning how to make the Good Five Cent Cigar into something I’d be proud of, it finally happened. I didn’t do this by myself, I had immense help from my Managing Editor, Nicholas Bush, our Compositor, Susan Sancomb, and the editorial staff, Caitlyn Picard, Sam Murray, Zack DeLuca, Stone Freeman, Jessica Pace, Autumn Walter and Rebecca Dickinson.
This started out as my own plight to make the Cigar something I would be proud to put my name down as editor-in-chief, but it has turned into something much bigger and stronger. This paper reflects the combined efforts and planning of the entire Cigar staff. It’s not my paper – it’s our paper.
It is our goal, as a university paper, to give our community the news and information that is relevant and important to them. This semester, we have high expectations for ourselves: reporting on the breaking and newsworthy stories that the campus wants to hear about, getting our facts and information correct and gaining a greater following across the campus.
My promise to the University and its community is that we, as a paper, will never stop, we will always report on what the University needs to hear about and we will never back down. We, the cigar staff and contributors, are going to be the “news-monsters” of this campus.
Already we have started to make our changes that are moving us into a new era of the Cigar. We have gone from our classic, orthodox look into a design that incorporates more modern and eye-catching elements. We want to appeal to our community and continue to grow as our society and culture grows. We don’t want to be a run-of-the-mill student newspaper, we want to make our mark as a modern, interesting, reliable and important tool in our community. This is only the beginning and I’m excited to see how this paper grows, both by me and the editors that come after me.
So welcome, to the new and improved, Good Five Cent Cigar.