About a year ago, in my first semester at Wright, I went to my English 101 professor, Vincent Bruckert, and asked if there was a student newspaper here at Wright.
While he told me there wasn’t currently, he also told me about our then-defunct publication, The Wright Times. In 2018 the paper – the same paper you’re reading now – ceased operations due to a lack of student interest and participation. As any naïve student would do, I asked if there was a way to restart our student paper.
I had no experience in journalism, it was just something I was considering as a career as I partook in the college tradition of changing majors. I hadn’t been involved with my high school’s newspaper and didn’t have much of a clue what journalism entailed, much less what running a student newspaper required.
Still, after a couple of brief conversations over the next week with Bruckert about what I was hoping to do with the paper, he set up a meeting with Wright College president David Potash. At this meeting, I realized what I thought was naïveté was actually a recognition of the opportunities that Wright College provides for its students.
I spent the end of that fall semester and the ensuing winter break recruiting our first staffers in five years. To my surprise, we immediately had interest from Wright students from just a rudimentary flyer placed around campus.
These first staffers helped us clean up the newsroom that had been unused for the last six years and build a new website and social media presence.
Thanks to this help we were able to hit the ground running and published our first articles the first week of spring 2022.
Borrowing from our fellow Wright College student publication, the Wright Side, I suppose where we’re at now is thanks to the butterfly effect. Asking a professor one question after class led to the paper being what it is now: a staff of nearly twenty students; massive support from our faculty and administration; two new journalism classes on campus taught by our papers faculty adviser, professor Adam Webster; and our first print edition since 2018.
Our paper and the help it received from every part of our school’s community have created opportunities for Wright students to learn about journalism and publish stories – something we didn’t have before.
The return of the paper has also allowed our staff to find out what our role is on campus and what we stand for as a paper.
First and foremost, our paper functions as the organization that covers Wright College. The people, events, teams, and everything at and relating to our campus are what we cover.
Wright is as great a place as its community makes it, and we hope that the paper helps our campus in its efforts to continue to grow and improve. We want this paper to not only help people be more informed about our school but also for our paper to act as the vital part of our community we know it should be.
As part of this, we want our paper to be a place for students to write about what they feel is important – to bring attention to things that we feel deserve that attention.
We make this our mission because we know that Wright’s students come from a diverse array of backgrounds and that many of our students have been overlooked their entire lives and systematically deprived of opportunities. Despite this, we know these stories should be told and we, as students, have created a platform for us to use.
In a world that pits us against each other, we’ve decided to create something so we can lift each other up. That doesn’t mean writing “puff pieces” about each other, our paper will always abide by journalistic ethics. What it means is we as students are working together to provide each other with an opportunity we wouldn’t have had without collaboration.
We’ve also seen our world become evermore full of disinformation and we’ve seen the corporatization of news media. I truly believe the Wright Times is a vital part of keeping journalism out of the control of the few and in the hands of the people it protects.
I hope as we move through this spring semester we can continue to use this paper to improve the school as a whole. While it might be my last semester at Wright, I’ve got complete faith in our community to keep this paper up and running beyond my time here, I hope we see that come to fruition.
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