By Ryan Broderick, Editor-in-Chief

Our first editor-in-chief, Olive Plunkett, started off the very first issue of The Hofstra Chronicle, back then titled The Nassau College Chronicle, with a piece titled “Why Editors Go Mad.”

The article was a quirky little timeline through Olive’s day with the underlying theme of “Being an editor of a newspaper makes you go crazy.” It was full of odd 1930s shorthand like “wuz” and strange references to something called a “tearoom.” We thought it would be a neat way to celebrate our 75 years of publishing to bringing it back.

My day starts at 9 o’clock, waking up to a computer already full of emails from PR people, other news outlets, editors, professors. If there weren’t 10 or more emails I’d be frightened the world had ended.

From there I drink a liquid breakfast of the largest cup of burnt coffee I can get on campus and hurry to a series of journalism, media and writing classes. In the journalism classes I get the cheery “your profession is dead” speech or the “this is how you work at a newspaper” lecture. The latter is always fun because I, in fact, do work at a newspaper. At least in Olive’s day she was going to school for something more substantial than a choice between some kind of news soup like The Huffington Post or selling out and just doing PR. Did they have PR in the thirties?

My lunch consists of anything I can order, buy and eat in 30 minutes—usually pizza—before I’m back off to class. In Olive’s original piece she describes the smell of delicious corned beef and cabbage and meeting with friends for drinks. I wonder if she meant chugging Red Bull, trying to do homework and code a website for your federal work study job all while hoping nobody notices you haven’t bathed or shaved in a couple days.

After work I usually slide into the office in a frenzy around 8 o’clock and hopefully sit down to crank out content, point designers in the direction of something that needs to be laid out or try my best to referee one of the many arguments happening between the copyeditors, devilishly trying to subvert their almighty section editors.

The madness isn’t all bad though. The editorial thousand-yard-stare is just the unfortunate bi-product of a mind racing a mile-a-minute, a lack of genuine human contact and the baseline necessary level of eccentricity (read: insanity) needed to kid yourself into thinking that you’ll be the first editor in history to get a campus excited about campus news.

In the end, I’m the captain of a ship, run by stressed out, agitated, neurotic part-timers that work for free and don’t get the credit they deserve. But at the end of that 30-hour day, those stressed out, agitated and neurotic people on my staff are the reason I don’t go mad. I think Olive would appreciate that.

Editor-in-Chief Ryan Broderick is one in a long line of stressed out editors. (Sean M. Gates)