Igor and my dream of an alternative community newspaper on the Brandeis campus has been realized with the publication of the first issue of The Brandeis Hoot. Our eight page black and white tabloid newspaper came out a little late but none the worse for wear. Lately, the Justice has had a somewhat dwindling news section. We covered a lot of interesting stuff, and when they published a few days later they covered some of the same stuff, in addition to some other things that we did not. You can read the Hoot online at thehoot.net.

While the Justice seems to think that everything we write and every comment we make is a direct jab at them, we’re just trying to put out a good newspaper and cover things of interest to the Brandeis community. I’m being completely sincere when I say that neither Igor nor I want the downfall of the Justice, all joking aside, and we are happy they exist on campus to provide an important student voice. We just want them to get better, and we want to offer student choices. Both goals appear to be happening, so we’re in a good place.

That said, we had a week to start up a newspaper, and it was quite a challenge. Igor, who reluctantly finally took the title of Editor-In-Chief at my urging, did far more work than I. But I did a pretty good amount of work myself, and making a paper, especially from scratch, especially in only a week, especially with no design, no set team, no systems and processes, and the occasional crashed hard drive, is no easy task. Our first issue, which was supposed to come out last Friday, came out instead on Monday. Now we have a short week, a late start, and we have to do it all over again in terms of actually creating proper libraries and such for publishing, and it will be quite the challenge to get out another quality newspaper on deadline.

We need a larger, competent staff. We’re getting there. But it is hard to train new people when you also have to actually get a paper out. Luckily, there are a lot of people willing to help, and some of them even have some good experience that they’re bringing to the table. With any luck, this week will not turn out to be a complete disaster. Also, its pretty darn cool to see something that just a few months ago was a silly idea actually out, in print. We did it! We published a newspaper!