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The Silhouette staff has always jokingly said that working in this office merits you a second degree majoring in The Sil. After having worked here for four years, nothing feels truer.
Every week the staff at The Silhouette churns out another paper. It’s considered small compared to most weekly papers and magazines, but an impressive feat for a student newspaper. We’ve worked unpaid overtime almost every single week that we’ve been here, and often use every moment that isn’t dedicated to schoolwork to edit and write articles, layout pages, shoot photos and videos, and hang onto some semblance of sanity for dear life.
I remember walking into the office in my first-year and sheepishly hovering around the door until someone asked me if I was looking for something.
And I was looking for something. I was looking for my place at this University, and luckily, I found it.
During the four years of my undergrad, I never quite fit into my program. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, and I was desperately in search of a place where I could feel both welcomed and challenged with new tasks.
The Silhouette was that place for me, and during my time here it has been more than an office. I’ve gained valuable life experience, met amazing friends, and have truly felt welcomed at our University.
For those of you reading and empathizing with the struggle to fit into your program, I cannot encourage you to join clubs more. McMaster’s larger faculties may not always provide the best learning environments, but our student body has gone above and beyond to create a system of clubs and services that can cater to all students.
Had it not been for The Silhouette, I may have dropped out of school in my second year, and who knows when I would have mustered up the strength to return.
Over the years I’ve seen four different staffs enter and leave this office. Each cohort has taught me innumerable lessons and inspired me by their work ethic. Whether it was a lesson in fact-checking, writing for a diverse audience, using my stories to send a compelling message, or simply knowing when to give up, I’ve learned more in this basement office than I could ever put to paper.
The Silhouette has been going strong for 86 years, and that is in thanks to the amazing people that have walked through these doors.
I would like to take this time to send a special thanks to the MSU for keeping us around for all these years and standing by our side even though many would like to think print is dead.
A huge thank you to all of my partners in crime over the years — SG, MB and JR — for keeping me sane. A shout of appreciation to our previous staff members and EICs for believing in me enough to keep me around this long. SC, JW and AT, thanks a million.
And the biggest thank you to our amazing staff and volunteers for making this year memorable and successful.
This is really cheesy, but I’m happy to say I’ve now successfully earned my second degree, a B.Sil, and I can’t wait to witness the cohorts to come next.
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Every few months, we get a message from a student or alumnus who wants us to take down something they’ve written for the paper. Our policy around removal has always been that if the published article poses a safety risk or creates any other form of danger, we’ll take it down or take your name off the article as requested. Otherwise, we will work with the person to find alternative ways to mitigate their discomfort with having the article published.
Sometimes their requests are unreasonable — for example, requests to take the article down because the writing was bad, the author no longer agrees with an opinion article they submitted or that a true fact published in the paper will damage someone’s reputation. I understand these concerns. Now that all of The Silhouette’s articles go online, student’s writing, or the news about their on-campus activities is no longer just under university-wide scrutiny. Anyone around the world has access to it. This has been great for many of our writers and articles. We get readers from unexpected countries (as far as Australia!), and have expanded our readership significantly. It also means we get more complaints from people who don’t want the articles they wrote or are mentioned in to show up in their Google searches.
Wanting to delete articles you’re not proud of is fundamentally misguided. It speaks to a lack of understanding of individual growth. Whether it’s because your writing wasn’t as good as it could be, or you said something you don’t believe anymore, your acknowledgement of both shows how much you’re grown and improved as both a writer and a person. Publishing a controversial opinion in any online platform is an important decision. You have to be prepared for the backlash and the feedback, and be ready to defend your point of view. If you change your mind later and realize that you don’t even know the person who wrote those horrible things, then it’s up to you to own up to it.
Wanting to delete articles you’re not proud of is fundamentally misguided. It speaks to a lack of understanding of individual growth.
If you fear a damaged reputation because you reported true facts, all I can say is: that’s too bad. The Silhouette won’t censor itself to help you clean up your public image. These situations can vary in severity, but they all speak to the need to act ethically, kindly and wisely in all aspects of your (public) life. This is especially true for student politicians.
While student newspapers and organizations are less serious and more forgiving than their “real world” counterparts, they’re still no joke. It’s a reality that’s not meant to scare you, but to inspire you to make the best of your time here. Put a lot thought into what you write and how you act. Stand up for things you believe in, but be open to changing your mind. If you make mistakes, the best thing to do is to own up to them. Even if we delete your article from our servers, rest assured that the internet at-large is not such a forgiving place.
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This marks the end of my second year writing for The Silhouette. Last year was the first time I ever got my feet wet in the world of sports writing. It was something I wanted to get into since high school and McMaster gave me a great outlet. This year I was the Sports Reporter for the school paper and got a better feel of what sports journalism as a job felt like in a university setting.
This opportunity has allowed me to have conversations with people I never thought I would talk to and develop a love for my school I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. It has opened doors that would’ve remained closed. I don’t know what my McMaster experience would be like if I didn’t walk into The Silhouette’s office in September 2014.
A little initiative on my part went a long way.
One of the first things I learned at The Silhouette was that my job wasn’t to write recaps or “gamers.” That’s boring and it would be a waste of my time and your time. As a student writer on a university campus that has teams that participate at the provincial and national levels in the OUA and CIS, I have a landscape full of potential content awaiting me. Access to student-athletes, coaches and games were at my fingertips. I have unique inside access to these things because I am a student here. Outside journalists don’t have this access.
I had classes with student-athletes and made friends with them even before getting this writing job. I learned right away from my former Sports Editor Scott Hastie that I should not hesitate to take advantage of the opportunities I have right in front of me. I started to meet with coaches and student-athletes regularly and quickly learned that, while they do hold respected positions in the sports world, they are human beings with stories.
They are not that much different from you and I.
This opportunity has allowed me to have conversations with people I never thought I would talk to and develop a love for my school I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. It has opened doors that would’ve remained closed.
The more I talked to these people and wrote about them I started to see it as more than a job. I genuinely enjoyed getting to hear their thoughts and understand their perspectives. As time went on my interviews felt more and more like conversations, which by the way, is how it’s supposed to be. I remember being nervous before some of my first interviews back in 2014, but now I just embrace each one as another chance to understand a person and their profession. Scott Radley, from The Hamilton Spectator, told me that a good sports writing piece will have the ability to make someone who wasn’t at the game or someone who knows nothing about sports want to read what I wrote.
Regardless of age or background, humans like to read about other humans. Telling human stories is when the best writing comes out. It doesn’t even have to be sports. Sports Reporter is my job title, but what I’m doing is telling the stories of human beings through the language of sports — a language I just so happen to speak.
This year I came to this realization: it’s about relationships and people.
It always has been and it always will be no matter what my job title is.
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I love a good subtweet. So long as it isn’t misogynistic, racist or a personal attack on my upbringing, I usually get a strange form of excitement from people sending pseudo-insults across cyberspace.
Working for a creative product, I am no stranger to people thinking they can freely insult our product because it is something visual and easy to critique. Sometimes these comments are harsh and unwelcome and leave me questioning our readers, but every now and again, a productive message gets filtered through. And those are the subtweets our paper lives for.
The Silhouette is McMaster’s student paper. Your student fees pay for it, and we want to represent you accurately. All of our content is made by student staff, and everyone here is part of the McMaster community and the MSU. We like hearing from you. We like knowing what you want from us.
It’s easy to throw a snarky insult our way and reap in the favourites on your Twitter or Facebook post, but what we’re really looking for is your honest concerns and advice for a product that will make you happy.
To help get this feedback, I am excited to announce a new initiative that will help you share your ideas, while also providing us with the constructive comments we’re hoping for. “Silvision” is a three-part campaign that includes a feedback survey and public forum, and will share the ways you can get involved and materialize your visions for your student paper. Subtweet or not, we want to get your input.
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As some of you have already noticed, and have vehemently tweeted at us about, The Silhouette no longer Livestreams every SRA meeting.
“What?! How could you do this? What did the SRA ever do to you?” The answer to these questions is: yes it’s true; we did it following the guidelines of the MSU constitution and Silhouette bylaws; the SRA did nothing to hurt us, this is simply a decision of content management.
It has been brought to my attention that there has been some miscommunication about this decision, as well as some misinterpretation of The Silhouette’s role as a news outlet on campus.
According to the MSU’s operating policies, The Silhouette “shall remain completely autonomous in terms of the editorial content and the basic format of the newspaper” (Operating Policy 1.3.1- The Silhouette, section 2.9). Being autonomous means that we have the freedom to cover what we want without the influence of the MSU. This is not limited to our print product, it also includes social media such as Livestream.
Every year The Silhouette changes its social media to reflect the feedback and interaction we get from the year past. This year, we chose to add three forms of social media — Snapchat, Instagram and we joined Reddit. We also decided to stop using one form of social media — Livestream. We made this choice because we found it was a waste of our money and effort. It costs $504 a year to have a Livestream account, and when we hosted a stream of a meeting or debate, on average our links to the stream only recieved a single digit number of clicks on social media (like our last SRA meeting Livestream which peaked at 8 viewers). Compare this to the hundreds of views we get on our own videos and the thousands of clicks we get on written online articles, and it is clear that this is not the most effective form of media to get a message across to students.
We don’t hate the SRA. We cover their meetings in whatever form we deem most appropriate — whether that is with an article (in print or online), an infographic, a series of tweets or a Livestream recording.
We would have been happy to Livestream last week’s meeting as it discussed an important student issue that we have been keeping up with online and in print, but I did not feel comfortable sending one of our staff members into a meeting before having made a concrete and written decision about the long and short term plans for the future of Livestreaming. Based on the emails I have received, the messages that have been sent to us over Twitter, and the conversations I have had in person, there is a clear misunderstanding about The Silhouette’s rights, and I was not going to send my staff members into a space where they would be bullied for exercising their freedom and editorial autonomy. Instead, this week we had a reporter cover the meeting in person, and they left a recorder to get the full meeting, since they had other school-related commitments to attend to on the night of the meeting. And for the record, no one from our staff promised to cover this meeting. I mentioned that we would consider it while at our Oct. 29 Board of Publications meeting, but no one reached out to me to confirm whether we would be there or not. If someone told you otherwise, you have been misinformed.
Just as The Silhouette acts to hold the MSU and SRA accountable, these two bodies also hold The Silhouette accountable in terms of our spending and budget. The argument for consistent Livestreaming has been that a portion of the budget has been allotted specifically to this cause — this may have been true in the past, but this is not true this year. This year we have a reduced subscription budget due to a few changes within the organization, we have not allotted any money towards purchasing equipment, and none of our job descriptions require that our staff Livestream any meetings or debates as a mandatory part of their job. It is simply not true that we are going against our budget or constitution by stopping the Livestream of these meetings.
I understand that having a Livestream of SRA meetings is important for accessibility, but making SRA meetings accessible is not The Silhouette’s job. We will make news about the meetings accessible, as well as any criticisms or praise of decisions made during the hours of meetings — but the meetings themselves? That falls on the shoulders of the MSU and the SRA. The MSU needs to make its services and decisons accessible to the public. We hold them accountable for this. This being said, The Silhouette is happy to lend its equipment to the MSU when or if they decide to do this.
The Silhouette will be covering some of the future meetings with Livestream, and other meetings through a medium of our choice. But, since The Silhouette does have autonomy, we do not need to say yes to demands related to coverage from the MSU, unless they are in writing as part of our operations. If we begin saying yes to these demands, at what point do we draw the line? At what point do we stop being a paper whose coverage is run editorially independent of the MSU? At what point do we become a mouthpiece for the MSU’s agenda and become a paper that is unable to hold our university and its students union accountable?
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