As first semester of our senior year comes to a close, we could not be more proud of our staff’s accomplishments. It’s kind of scary that we’ve now finished our fourth issue — leaving us with only four to go. It may sound cliche, but time has honestly flown by. It’s been a fun year, even though it hasn’t gone as smoothly as we wanted it to when we first planned for this school year.

For issue four, we had to be flexible. With football winning state part way through our production cycle, we had to change a few of our assignments up in order to accommodate for coverage. This was quite the challenge and unfortunately, some people were out of an assignment since we had to cut two sports pages, merging the two empty pages into one spread. Thankfully, we were able to work everything out by switching some pages around and still put out the best paper that we could given the circumstances.

There was so much that we wanted to try and do this year and while some of it worked out, others did not so much, such as our new behind-the-scenes section. But, as we go into winter break, we have time to reflect and figure out how to improve the paper for next year  even more. Hopefully we’ll be able to implement these new ideas to finish our last semester on staff strong.

Going into our last four issues will without a doubt be difficult. Besides pushing our staff to do the best that we can, we will have to push ourselves as well to stay motivated. We saw this briefly this past issue, as we were all prepping for finals and were attempting to balance our other activities, sometimes putting off newspaper duties. We’ll need to refocus and regroup, but we have full faith that we can finish strong.

It’s been an interesting year so far having to manage the entire staff. It hasn’t always been fun — especially with fast-approaching deadlines and working together amidst all the stress involved — but it’s been more than worth it. Overall, we could not be more thankful for our staff and the opportunities we have been given in this first half of the year.