In my senior year of high school, I decided I wanted to be a writer, and I figured that the easiest way to make that happen was to go into a career in journalism. Why that never fully played out is a story for another time, but I do have enough experience with journalism through my time as a student journalist, newspaper intern, and high school publications adviser to say that I’ve been “journalism adjacent” for the past thirty years.

Where this starts is with my high school newspaper, Voices Inside. I’ve written about it already in the context of an underground newspaper that an outgoing editor published in frustration. She was one of the founders of the paper during my freshman year, since th4ere hadn’t really been a newspaper at Sayville High School for a while (I think there was one called the “Sayville Flashette” or something at one point), and my guess is that they saw the need for it. The early issues were 8-1/2 x 11 photocopies that were laid out using an early version of PageMaker (the precursor to InDesign), and were full of what I guess you would typically see in a high school paper: reports on events, movie reviews, and horoscopes.

At some point in my sophomore year, I started saving every issue of the paper, which is around the time I started submitting pieces for publication. Prior to this, my only experience with a student newspaper was trying to have a cartoonist career in my junior high school paper but anonymously as “the Unknown Cartoonist.” It was a Gary Larson-esque set of one-panel comics that failed miserably because I couldn’t and still cannot draw to save my life. And everyone knew it was me anyway, so even the unknown part was a bust.

Man, eighth grade was hell.

Anyway, in my sophomore and junior years, I wrote reviews as well as one opinion piece where I called out “parents groups” (I have no idea what that means either) for getting up in arms about Beavis and Butt-head and Mortal Kombat. I even referenced Seduction of the Innocent, although nobody got the reference. What would change going into my senior year–and what made me want to pursue journalism–was that my teacher made me the editor-in-chief. 

It came out of nowhere, too. I had maybe three or four pieces published prior to that and thought I’d make a good news editor or something, certainly not be in charge of the whole thing. And while I was already in a leadership position at school as the president of a community service club, I wasn’t ready for this and certainly wasn’t prepared to handle the legacy I thought the paper had. I’d seen the founders and original editors put together some great work from some brilliant regular contributors. They’d been a couple of years ahead of me and always seemed older, more mature, and smarter than I was by leaps and bounds, the type of “intellectual cool” high school students who were reading way beyond what was assigned in high school English and were listening to college radio bands while caring about the right causes. I wore hockey jerseys and watched Highlander on the weekends, and my greatest intellectual achievement was being able to kick anyone’s ass in Trivial Pursuit.

Beyond my intimidated admiration for those seniors, I had a tremendous admiration for what they had managed to produced when I was a sophomore. Even when I read it now, there was some crisp, sophisticated writing and the willingness to push the boundaries of what our conservative-leaning high school would allow. The best issue of their run was the special AIDS Awareness Edition published in the spring of 1993, the capper to a school-wide AIDS Awareness Day that was full of facts as well as stories about its effect on society. It was daring and more open-minded than my peers and my community was at the time (and in many cases still aren’t).

So that meant I had a lot to live up to, which is why I promptly ran the paper into the ground.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But I don’t think anyone took over the newspaper after I graduated, because most of the class was seniors and a few freshmen. So it’s more like there was literally nobody there to take over. In fact, when I held my first editorial meeting, I stood next to one of my fellow editors and talked about how I wanted to “push the envelope” with the paper that year. I can’t say if that speech was effective or not, just that I kept saying “push the envelope” like a giant tool, not knowing how that was going to be easier said than done because so many of us were learning as we went and getting a “polished” product was going to take some time. I started by commissioning my friend Jeremy to create a new masthead and made sure every issue had a cover story that was relevant, timely, and the most interesting thing in the paper that month.

Putting it together was a combination of “new media” and some very old school cutting and pasting. We were printed by the same department in our school district that put together the district newsletter, so we were black and white with one spot color on 8-1/2 x 11 paper (well, 17 x 22 folded over and stapled). The paper was typed and saved to a floppy disk, but we had to mark where the photographs were going to go on each page and send the physical photos along with that marked-up printout. I would do the same thing in college and wouldn’t do a completely digital production process until I was a journalism teacher in 2005.

As far as hard-hitting news, there weren’t very many in our boring middle class suburban high school. I remember an essay my co-editor wrote about Kurt Cobain that really dug into mental health awareness at a time when we weren’t paying attention to that at all. Another one of the writers penned a scathing editor about the egomania that had taken over club presidents–a not-so-thinly veiled shot at me, who didn’t do a single thing to edit or alter the essay and let it run as is. The horoscopes, though, were the most popular item in the paper because of how “eerie and accurate” they were even though they were filled with so many inside jokes.

My contributions to the paper were pretty regular as well beyond just editing, since I gave myself a column with the first issue. it was a full-page essay column called @#$&! and served as my way to rant and ramble, mostly to fill space that needed to be filled. The first column was about Generation X because the prior summer I’d read a Newsweek article about the topic and had watched Reality Bites (if you want to read it, here’s a link to it via Pop Culture Affidavit). My favorite, or best one, was called “Veil” wherein I addressed the recent “community concerns” (read: NIMBY-ism) about how a new park being proposed was going to encourage “teenage hangout”. Because, you know, teenagers drinking in parks and the woods is the worst thing that can happen to the suburbs. My thesis was that teenagers will drink and instead of pearl clutching, the adults in the community should work on teaching them about being safe and using good judgment. Not bad for someone who didn’t drink at the time and spent most of his Friday nights watching John Hughes films.

Other columns were about love, censorship, things in the news, and reflections on finally graduating high school and when I look at them, I see someone who was trying to find his voice in an age before blogs in the only place he knew how. My journalistic efforts were solid and I’m still proud of myself for interviewing my friend’s band (whom you can hear about on episode 120 of Pop Culture Affidavit) and for a piece that my friend Craig and I did where we looked into the issue of distributing condoms in school. It was the most issue-centered reporting I did and am actually amazed that I had the balls to interview our principal about it.

That principal as well as my journalism teacher have long since retired and while there is some version of a Sayville High School newspaper available online, it hasn’t been updated since December 2022. I didn’t want to throw away the old issues of the newspaper that I had held onto, so I put them all in an envelope (including my copy of the “unauthorized” voices outside issue) and sent them to SHS with a note. I have no idea what they did with them, and if they threw them away, I hope they had fun looking at them before they did.

Unlike so much of what I have written about in this series, I actually have little to no regret about my time editing the paper. Okay, I probably should regret that no legacy existed, but this was one of the rare time si flipped through something and didn’t immediately feel like shit. Even the memories I have are mostly silly or fun and without much drama, probably because I see the experience as formative and fully understand that I had no idea what I was doing at 17.

Then again, does anyone?