A farewell from our Editor-in-Chief

This is the last issue of The Advocate for this academic year. What a year it’s been: We started off about a month before our first issue, then  worked for two weeks before the first day of fall term to get our design down.

This year, we did something unusual to your weekly campus paper, and that was printing it in a tabloid format.

To some of you, it was probably a challenge getting used to the new design, but I hope everyone ended up enjoying it, because I sure did. I think it makes for a convenient way to read the news, and the giant graphics look really cool on the cover.

Aside from changing the dimensions of the paper itself, the workflow within the editorial team was great, for the most part. I really enjoyed working with the team and, moving on, hope to create more relationships like the ones we have fostered this year.

Despite the frustrations and last-minute changing and editing under pressure to meet deadlines, this year there has seen a bit more flexibility. This allowed us to add more interesting touches and fun graphic content, but we still had a tough time making the paper look interesting due to an overflow of content – which is a good problem to have.

The biggest downside was taking too much time to get the final product finished on a Thursday afternoon before evening crept up. When we covered Arun Gandhi, the global peace activist who visited Mt. Hood on a Thursday afternoon-and-night, we weren’t out of the newsroom until well after midnight.

Mt. Hood Community College is an interesting place, and there are a lot of different stories here that might never have been covered in other publications. The campus is just brimming with life and student engagement.

I feel like there has been a great relationship between our humble publication and the other student activities and clubs, too. This relationship went beyond student activities, and reached faculty, support staff, and other employees at the college.

The openness of the administration is to be commended because (from what I’ve heard) previous administrations were far from friendly with The Advocate.

This has been a great year, and after 31 issues, I am ready to take a short break before jumping back into a reporting capacity at PSU.

-Yours truly,

Greg Leonov

Editor-in-Chief 2014-15