SUNY Potsdam’s The Racquette Newspaper: How Is It Run and Who Runs It?
It’s a normal Tuesday night in November, although the temperature is abnormally warm, and the wind is howling in excitement for this break from the usual rainy cold. The top floor of Sission Hall is pretty quiet, the old lights stream a yellow glow down the dark wooden doors, and onto the shaggy green carpet.
The tight hallway is lined with doors: Esports Club, Club Rugby, Club Soccer, etc. At the end of the desolate hallway, two open doors leak the subtle noise of keyboard typing and quiet conversation. The name on these doors is “The Racquette,” the student newspaper of SUNY Potsdam.
“Lendhi, is this going in?” says Zachariah Morehouse, the current co editor-in-chief. Lendhi Zamor, the current editor-in-chief, looks over at Zach’s screen and nods her head. “Okay, and how should I do that?” Morehouse replies as the two smile and look over the digital paper, moving around a text box till it lands in the perfect spot.
A small but eclectic team of four is hard at work on Adobe InDesign, pasting in articles, and moving around picture boxes. “We have a pretty consistent way to do each page, but sometimes we just go haywire with it, we are pretty freeform,” said Morehouse as he moved around an article.
Despite being a small team, and a small campus, the paper manages a steady flow of articles. “We definitely used to struggle, but we’ve been going for a few semesters with pretty consistent writers,” Morehouse said. However just like The Hill News, sometimes the editors have to break out their writing skills. “If we don’t get one in on time, one of us will have to pick it up,” said Mark, an editor, in a joking tone from the doorway.
The mice slide across the desk, and the periodic clicks sound as Lindhi reads off an emailed list of colors ranging from lime green and lemon yellow, to dark purple and cool blue. The Racquette prints locally on the SUNY Potsdam campus, and it’s cheaper to print on color paper, so they embrace it as a staple of their paper.
And it’s hard to miss. The small office is strewn with a rainbow of colorful issues of The Racquette, much like the piles of THN copies that surround every corner of our office. Unlike THN’s, The Racquette has a much more concise publishing process. “We do topic meeting for half an hour, then go immediately into layout,” said Morehouse. “We send it to the printer that night, get it Thursday, and distribute it Friday,”
Because the editorial team is so small, writers are encouraged to stay to learn how layout works. “We have a lot more people that come to our topic meetings and we encourage everyone to stay for layout, but not everyone is going to stay,” Morehouse said. He noted however, that with such a small operation, the extra hands aren’t necessarily needed. “Four people, two pages each, eight pages, that’s The Racquette.”
The final details are added, the articles are read and read again, and with Zamor’s approval, the new issue of The Racquette is sent off to be printed, and the four editors shut off the dim yellow lights, and exit down the slim hallway, ready to begin the process all over again next week.