Leaving Athenian — Our Hopes for the Future Pillar

Graphic Credit: Alekhya Maram

By Alekhya Maram and Anna Ravid

For the past year, we have had the incredible pleasure to helm The Pillar as Editor in Chief and Managing Editor. In an unconventional year, despite many limitations, we hope to have left our mark on the journalism community here at Athenian. 

Assuming the mantle of Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor during this unprecedented time (as it is oft-described in the news) was overwhelming. Due to coronavirus, our formerly print paper had to transition to an online format. We had to design a new publishing schedule to accommodate the online format, set up a website, offer office hours, plan lessons on journalistic writing and current events, and try to foster a sense of community over Zoom. 

While we knew that this transition would pose enormous challenges, we also saw an opportunity for change. We were happy to introduce new opportunities for flexibility and discretion within the class. The online format allowed our team to experiment with a wide range of mediums and styles: we had weekly cooking columns, digital concert reviews, and podcasts centered around everything from sustainability to mental health.  

Our greatest challenge was realizing a longstanding goal of The Pillar, creating our own website. We began the year as novices at web-design; our many painstaking hours learning how to feature posts, credit photography and organize the sections yielded a modest result for our first edition. But as time passed, and we continued to experiment, the website took shape and has now become an essential component of the Journalism program. In future years, we hope that this year’s website will be a foundation on which The Pillar’s online presence can grow. 

As underclassmen, serving as staff writers on The Pillar was entirely different. Our first project together was in sophmore year, writing a series of articles investigating Athenian’s old community garden. Speaking to John Harvey, we learned about Athenian’s hydroponics systems, and chickens that had disappeared from campus during the masterplan construction. Furthermore, we went on to interview Amy Wintermeyer to get an administrative perspective on student efforts to revive the garden. While Athenian has yet to install a sexy garden, we hope our series made the community aware of a little known, yet fascinating corner of Athenian history. 

Rather than sitting stagnantly in our Zoom boxes, during layout week, the entire staff would pile into the David-Ruenzel room in the library: a small, dusty room crowded with monitors and papered with old Pillar editions. Armed with an abundance of highlighters and red pens, the entire staff would proofread and initial each sheet of the paper. Each edition, the Editor in Chief and Managing Editor would take on the dreaded task of arranging the ‘jumps’ page, containing the continuations of articles from every section. We can safely say that we were very glad to escape editing the jumps this year. 

Though the two of us are leaving Athenian, we want to ensure that The Pillar remains a platform dedicated to uplifting student voices. We hope students are encouraged to explore their passions, whether they be about environmental justice, space travel, racial equality, or international cooking. We also encourage them to delve into unknown topics, and to ensure their articles are balanced, truthful, and uphold journalistic integrity. In our time on The Pillar, we hope we pushed students to consider how journalism can be used to truthfully and transparently highlight the things that they care about. 

Real journalism is uncomfortable, messy, and often exhausting––it forces us to reckon with all sides of the issue at hand. A good piece will never leave everyone feeling happy. Rather, it engenders a diversity of opinions, sparking discourse and maybe even conflict. On a school campus that strives to prioritize equity and egalitarianism, it is imperative that we protect student voice and never shy away from hard topics, even in the face of backlash or pressure. 

Ultimately, The Pillar is crucial not only as a space to hone one’s writing abilities, but allows passionate and enterprising students to push the boundaries of what we consider “safe,” while simultaneously striving to uphold the truth.