From the Editor's Desk

Here I sit, trying to write some sort of introduction of myself to the readers, and I find myself at a loss for words. Maybe a loss for words isn’t exactly true. Perhaps it’s trying to come up with some good ones to use in my column.

My name is Tom Ritchey, and I’m the new editor of the News-Register. I’m majoring in journalism and have been a student at North Lake for a little over a year. I’ve been a staff writer for the newspaper since last spring. Some of you may remember my stories about waterproofing and the wireless network in the library.

So what will I do with the newspaper now that I’m the one in charge? I really don’t know. Our former editor, Josh Bohling, is an awfully tough act to follow. After all, the News-Register is an award-winning college newspaper and we’ve been recently nominated for a Pacemaker award, which our former editor told me is sort of like a Pulitzer for college newspapers. But I digress.

What I want to do is keep the paper going as well as it has been, and maybe even leave my own mark on it. I have a good staff to work with, so it shouldn’t be too hard to keep it going as well as it has.

I would also like to see more student feedback and participation. The paper is how a great many of the students and even the faculty and staff learn what is happening around campus. I, for one, want the readers to give us as much input as they can about what they want to see in the paper.

While thinking about ways to get students involved, I came up with a contest idea about political cartoons. I know the campus houses a lot of artists, so I’m hoping for a good amount of submissions.

I’d also like the paper to cover more hard news stories that profile the stranger things that happen on campus. Take the radio prank incident, for example. A man working for the “Kidd Kraddick in the Morning” radio show walked into a classroom in early September and disrupted an unsuspecting speech class. I’m not sure I see the point of the stunt, and many people that I’ve interviewed certainly didn’t find the joke all that funny.

But there is always more to a story. All too often when one encounters a strange story, what happens after the initial incident can be equally as odd.

Among the problems with the entire incident was that a student from the class, Milton Rohas, had to physically go down to the police station to get help. Sure, it turned out all right; the intruder was a producer from a radio show trying to pull a stunt for his program. But what if he hadn’t been some prankster and was actually a dangerous man with a gun and the will to use it? Would Rohas even have been able to exit the classroom? And if he had, would everyone in the classroom still be uninjured by the time he returned with the police?

It is unfair to fault the police for the time it took to get from their station to the classroom. They immediately responded when Rohas came to them. Dr. Linda Long, the speech professor whose class was interrupted by the prankster, suggested that panic buttons be installed in every classroom on campus.

It could be argued that someone invading a classroom would try to keep a person from pressing the button. But if such buttons were installed, it would make it that much easier to summon help if an emergency occurs.

I hope you all continue to read the News-Register. Feel free to send us your feedback on anything about the paper, either at our e-mail address, nnr7420@dcccd.edu, or in person at the newsroom, A-260.