"Pride (in the name of the AFP)"

What a wonderful day.

You know those days you get up in the morning, get ready and think it's gonna be an ordinary day... then as the day accelerates, you find that it is a phenomenal one?

Well, today was a day like that for me. I got up, struggled to find something to wear, threw whatever on, gathered my things and drove to school. Before I even reached school, my phone rang, and it was Kat, the assistant editor informing me that the newspapers we sent to the printers the day before had been delivered and were ready for distribution.

PHEW! Issue one is out, and I can't express the amount of weight that has been lifted off my shoulders. I wanted so bad to get that sucker out of the way and move on to the next issue. The time has come, finally.

But the coolness doesn't stop there, because plenty happened on this very special day for me, the staff, the advisor, and even the administration of ACC.

You see, it's a very long story, but basically the Arapahoe Free Press has been struggling to stay alive for a few years. ACC's administration has wanted to kill the publication for reasons I'm not clear on, and as a result, it has made running the thing efficiently near impossible. It has also made the administrators read the newspaper religiously, but never express anything positive. From what I understand, the administration read the paper to see just what was being said about them, which usually pissed them off. Hence, the plans to make the AFP disappear.

Today, I believe the AFP made history. Or perhaps changed its fate. Not only did we get kudos from the advisor who was raving about what a great first issue we had produced (then proceeded to rip it apart with red ink), but we also got kudos from two very unlikely sources.

The vice president of the college came in and congratulated us. I thought nothing of it at first, and simply thanked him, thinking he's a pretty good-looking guy for his age. Later, another member of the administration came in and congratulated us as well. I thought maybe this was normal for the first issue out of courtesy. Chris, our advisor informed us that this was in fact the first time he'd ever seen or heard of administrators congratulating the newspaper staff on their work. Chris has been with ACC 20 years, so to hear him say that made my heart skip a beat.

Am I on the brink of reviving ACC's newspaper with utmost quality, to the point where the administration will love it enough to pay it more heed? Or did we simply write things that pleased the administration?

I hope it is the former rather than the latter, because we had a couple of stories in there with the potential to upset the administration. Either way, I'm so proud of myself, and I'm proud of my team, and I'm proud of the Arapahoe Free Press.

And now, we move on to issue two...