Farewell from your Winter - Spring 2020 EIC!
David Deloso
Hi FrNBNds,
Today marks the official end of publishing for Spring 2020! This has been an incredibly challenging quarter (to say the least), but the way you all came together and supported each other has made me so proud to be your EIC. I wrote this message a couple weeks ago as a Letter from the Editor, but given the ongoing protests it would be inappropriate to center my own voice on our website. Instead, I’m leaving it here for the NBN community; it was always meant for you anyway. We have some pieces still in the works, but this will be the last time you hear from me before I officially pass the torch to Maya! Without further ado, here’s my sappy farewell:
For the past two quarters, I’ve had the honor of serving as NBN’s editor-in-chief. And you know what? I’m proud of that. So proud, in fact, that if you stalk my LinkedIn profile or dig up my résumé, you’ll find this position prominently displayed alongside some text detailing what I did during my time here. And maybe from a distance, that’s what this experience was: a few lines I can use to show employers that I did journalism in college.
I’ve never been a fan of looking at things from a distance, though. In fact, the somewhat outdated prescription on my glasses makes it pretty much impossible to. The bullet points on my résumé might paint a blurry, nondescript picture of my time as EIC, but to let that tell the whole story would be a disservice to the people who have touched my life these past few months.
I doubt the moments that made this experience memorable will ever come up in a job interview. I'll never answer, “Tell me about how you worked effectively under pressure” with a story about banging on a pan with a spoon to quiet down the audience when I emceed our Winter Quarter open mic. The “Accomplishments” tab on my LinkedIn will never include creating my graphic design magnum opus on a whim because “pizza tree cow ocean” didn’t yield any image results on Wikimedia Commons. My cover letters will never begin with an anecdote about watching Too Hot to Handle and playing "Quiplash" in the newsroom.
Still, those are the moments that will stick with me. To be clear, that’s not an exhaustive list—it would take many more paragraphs to recount every memory that I’ll cherish from my tenure as EIC. But the point is, for every hour I spent editing articles, responding to emails or discussing finance, there was an hour spent goofing off and having fun with my friends. Because at the end of the day, my staff members weren’t just people I worked with, they were (and still are) some of my closest friends.
The term “FrNBNdship” is used a lot around this publication. It’s a bit of a cutesy name that’s become more important than ever to me recently. Every Sunday at our weekly meetings, I didn’t just see writers and editors; I saw friends supporting each other, I saw bonds forming and I saw a thriving community developing. It reminded me why I fell in love with NBN in the first place: we were brought together as a group of journalists, but we aren’t just there for our writing—we’re there for each other.
That said, I’ve also certainly been inspired by our writing. Over the past quarter, NBN has published pieces that are moving and informative in addition to stories that are snarky and hilarious. The articles we put out by no means provide a comprehensive account of student life during this moment in history. Rather, they’re vignettes that illustrate small, yet meaningful, pieces of our lives: our frustrations, our reflections and even the TV shows we binged.
I'd like to think that's what we're meant to do: by writing, we’re zooming in (pun intended) on the Northwestern experience and showing parts of the whole as clearly as we can. Any image we produce will be imperfect, just as we are. Still, I believe the picture we’ve painted captures the vibrance we see in our community—the creativity, the wit and the passion that we could never hope to cram into a couple bullet points.
Thank you to NBN for providing me with boundless joy, incredible memories and some of my best friends. I am so proud I got to lead this publication and I’m so excited to see Maya push us further and bring us to new heights.
-- David