As editor of the Express, I want to thank my tremendous staff this semester and our amazing advisers for attempting to produce the closest representation of what life has been at City College these past four months.
This will be the first time in the six print editions produced this semester that we have needed to make major corrections in our reporting. Due to the high quality work produced by my fellow students this semester, I often have to remind myself that we are still in training.
As a working media professional studying the latest trends in sharing information in this glorious age of incredible mobile technology, I know that it’s more important than ever to be accurate. I often forget that what I see on the screen, whether it be television, a desktop computer or a cellphone, is not reality.
It’s a facsimile, a reproduction, a canned summation of events transplanted through time and space to be digested at my convenience and enjoyed at my discretion.
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that reality does not have a pause button, nor does it have an editor. No matter how many pixels we add, high definition will always pale in comparison to actual human touch, and hot takes on Twitter, no matter how instant, will never surpass the speed of original thought.
As chroniclers of human interaction, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned as a journalist is that our work is meant to be the truest homage to real life with the full understanding that we will for- ever be a poor substitute for reality. What we see in the media will never be truly representative of what’s really out there.
This includes the work we’ve done this semester. We have made mistakes. But I truly believe and am honored to say that we got pretty damn close to reporting accurately on real life at City College.
Thank you for reading.
