But seriously, I didn’t sign up for The Liberator when I was hunting for an elective to round out my junior year schedule. I was going to be a yearbook kid, of all things. Looking back, it seems hard to imagine. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve embraced the paper since the administration’s black-box scheduling algorithm flung me into Room 701; I’ve distributed thousands of Liberators throughout the halls of LASA and, bizarrely, Gorzycki Middle School. You’ve probably heard me ask, “Would you like a Liberator?” You’ve probably said no.
Regardless, my first year with the paper as a staffer was mostly uneventful. I dove head-first into the deep end with an Issue 1 article covering the 2022 Austin mayoral elections, where I ended up interviewing Kirk Watson’s campaign manager. That was a bit too much for me, and I focused on comparatively simple articles after that. Not knocking the news section, but it turns out that Club Crazy is a very easy assignment! And in a year where I was taking six AP courses, easy assignments were right up my alley. At the end of the spring semester, I applied to replace JC Delgadillo as the Liberator’s Web Editor because I thought I could handle it with a lighter senior year workload.
If I regretted that decision, this would be the sarcastic sentence informing you, the reader, of that. But I haven’t regretted becoming a web editor at all! It’s a great time, but it’s hard to put down in print. I fixed an error with the Expanded Menu in SNO Design Option’s Site Designer… yeah. In the real world, I’ve learned that being in charge of staffers is an entirely different dynamic than being one yourself. I’ve learned that it’s very rewarding to watch an article go from a pitch in your mind to a writer’s assignment to text on a screen to words on a page. And I’ve learned that photo galleries are a tool of the devil. I published what was probably the first Liberator article ever written by a middle schooler. It’s been a curious, fascinating year.
I will complain about one final thing, though. The process of uploading every article, graphic, and image to the website each issue is incredibly tedious. More than the editing process, more than the web design, more than the social media management, I Did Not Sign Up For That.
Still worth it.
