The Anchor, better than it used to be

*This is part of The Ranchor issue of The Anchor, which is a satire edition of our student newspaper. None of this article is meant to be taken as fact.*

The true story of how The Anchor has gotten so much better in 10 years time: An interview

By: Nada Motolli

What makes an organization great? It’s 2027, and there are so many organizations throughout the world that qualify as great. Whether it’s the Cleveland Browns, who’ve come out of nowhere to win an unprecedented seven straight Superbowls, Necco, who’s tiny wafer snacks have sold so many packages that they’ve turned Venezuela into a single factor to produce them or Wall Street, which has become so important due to Lord Trump’s wall building, that they’ve become the largest producer of both walls and streets in the United States, these are all organizations that one knows are great.

The Anchor has become great, but apparently it hasn’t always been that way. I’ve reached out to Alumnus Adam Nottoli to learn what The Anchor was like 10 years ago, when he served as one of the Co-Editors in Chief, and how it’s different now. Here’s what our interview looked like.

NM: Welcome Adam, and thank you for joining me today. As I’m to understand it, you were the Co-Editor in Chief of The Anchor way before I got here. I’m curious as to what was different then. Now, tell me, what do you think of the electric fence we have here? Isn’t it great? I love it.

AN: Yep, I was here. I was in charge here in the 2016-2017 school year. And boy, let me tell you, I would have loved an electric fence. Every single day people were knocking on the window asking to use our printer or our computers. Prospective students were constantly looking in at me like I was an animal in an exhibit.It was awful!

NM: Yeah, it’s great. And if I’m to understand, you also had to pay students to create the pages?Right now we have computers that automatically put the pages together; all you have to do is copy/paste the article.

AN: Well, you won’t believe it, but basically all we did was copy/paste stuff too. Somehow people still managed to mess it up all the time. One guy had todo each column on its own and it made no sense at all. Sports editors were just a little behind back then. And, most of the time there really weren’t any editors there anyways. We had half participation at our meetings, and the people who came didn’t really care enough to talk about the paper. One time we put off part of our weekly meeting for a significant amount of time when a lady walked by with a dog. It was really hard to reel everybody back in after that fiasco. They mostly just watched Netflix.

NM: I’ve never written an article in my life, we have a ton of staff writers to do it, and they all get paid a ton of money. Even I get paid a ton of money as the Editor in Chief. Did you guys make a ton too?

AN: Well, for the longest time we had exactly zero guest and staff writers. Then, in order to help get more students, they took away all of the money that we had budgeted for writers. And as for us, we worked a ton for the amount of money they gave us,probably averaging out to like 40 cents an hour. So I guess we weren’t really getting rich.

NM: And everybody read The Anchor back then too, right?

AN: Oh man, I wish. We had a ton of leftover papers. But it wasn’t all bad; I never had to buy wrapping paper on Christmas.Our website was pretty good, but it did let all thirty people who read The Anchor do it for free, so that was a little counter intuitive for something looking to make money.

NM: Wow, The Anchor has definitely gotten way greater, but let’s talk a little about you now.What were you going here for,Communication right? Since you worked at the newspaper?

AN: Actually, I was an Education Major when I was in school.Then, when the great Mrs. Devos took over our school system and made it so great, I decided teaching was too mainstream, so I quit and now I live in a box under the bridge. It was the thing to do back then, I just had to find myself.

NM: Wow, that’s a whole bucket of worms that I definitely don’t want to get into, so we’ll take it back to Anchor questions.Tell me about production nights,how did those go?

AN: I usually got in pretty late in the day, because I had class and other jobs to work at. But, we were there until 1 a.m. on normal days, and 11 p.m. or midnight if we were lucky and everybody got their stuff done ahead of time.

NM: Did you say 1 a.m.?That’s incredibly late! It usually takes me and my Co-Editor like twenty minutes to get everything done!

AN: When I worked here, in twenty minutes we would have probably talked about thirty or forty different topics, most of which had nothing to do with the paper, and then looked up and listened to different songs after we made fun of each other. Lots of really good bonding times.You know, honestly, a lot of our issues were probably due to bad management. But definitely not by me, I was the best at what I did. I blame Amber.

NM: Thanks so much for agreeing to talk to me today Adam, it sounds like The Anchor really was a terrible business back then. It’s a good thing it became so great today, I mean,who would want to work for 40 cents an hour? And based on what you’ve told us today, especially about yourself, it’s clear that everything is better now, except for one thing. Millennials still suck.