What the ‘Prince’ prints

While spring semester junior year found me trying to ditch all of my extracurricular activities in anticipation of a heavy course load, it also found one of my roommates donning the mantle of “executive editor for opinion for The Daily Princetonian” and facing a dearth of writers. He’s not exactly an imposing figure, but one way or another — that I don’t remember the exact details speaks to his persuasiveness — he shanghaied me aboard: To my writing responsibilities of a terrifying junior paper was added a biweekly column. A year and a half later, faced with my last column, it seems appropriate to reflect on this newspaper and the role it plays on campus.

By far the most impressive facet of The Daily Princetonian is the titular “Daily.” For comparison, think of the most complicated thing you’ve ever organized: Maybe you put together a weekend conference; maybe you’re president of a large club; maybe you run a small business. These jobs are exceptional, but, odds are, they don’t measure up in complexity to publishing a campus-wide newspaper five days a week, 24 weeks a year. It’s hard to imagine the manifold tasks that must happen every single day for the ‘Prince’ to come out. Personally, I find it astonishing.

Of course, it’s silly to laud this organizational feat in a vacuum: For it to be worthwhile, it must accomplish something. In my opinion, the main accomplishment — the wellspring of value for the ‘Prince’ — is that it provides a central forum for campus discourse. When an issue faces the student body, nine times out of 10 the debate either starts in or passes through these pages. And with the guarantee of daily publication, that makes sense: What better place to air your thoughts and grievances that in the newspaper that, if nothing else, will surely go to print tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?

Let me be clear: Our discourse is often inane and overblown and often leads to nothing. But having the ‘Prince’ is merely a good tool; how well we use this tool is another question entirely. In other words, the fact that ‘Prince’ discourse is not by itself sufficient to bring about meaningful change on campus should not distract us from that fact that having a permanent, socially accepted, more-or-less trusted print forum is an indispensable cog in the larger machine that, when operating properly, does bring about meaningful change. At the very least, it would be absurdly pessimistic to deny that the reporting and editorializing that takes place here have sparked debate, if not in every issue, at least often enough to merit praise.

I see it as almost inevitable that many news stories will be poorly written, and that many columns will be poorly thought-out. If you want to fill six to 10 pages each day, you often have to scrape the bottom of the story barrel. You might not have time to edit with your writers as much as you’d like, much less the liberty to tell your columnists that they really should scrap a given idea and start from scratch. Now, I don’t mean that as justification: Crap-with-an-excuse is still just crap. But I do think it comes with the territory of daily publication, and I think it is a hit worth taking.

Indeed, we ‘Prince’ writers might be more aware than most that a lot of what we publish is lacking. The truth is, it’s really hard to write something good: Opportunities to affect the campus discourse for the better are rare, and the presence of mind to turn good thoughts into good writing is rarer still. This is my 15th column, and I think I’ve written two or three good columns, two or three decent columns and, otherwise, largely mediocre columns. Judging from the work of my fellow columnists, this is typical: One or two write well consistently, one or two write poorly always, but most of us are firmly in the middle, trying our best to say something worthwhile. We may fail more often than we succeed, but, with effort, we can hope to fail less and less.

That points to a final role the ‘Prince’ serves: a sandbox. As reluctant as I was to join a year and a half ago, I do recognize that it has made me a much better writer; it has afforded me more improvement per hour invested than my writing seminar, than any class, than any other extracurricular activity. Helping writers improve isn’t as big a role as that of central discourse forum, nor as important. If anything, it comes off as a bit self-serving: We’re the ones who improve our writing and get to feel special for seeing our words in print. On this count, though, I think there’s little more to do than be grateful and accept any comment-section malice in stride.

Greg Burnham is a math major from Memphis, Tenn. He can be reached at gburnham@princeton.edu.