The words we bled for the broadsheet

My memories of The Miami Student start with wax, not words.

In the mid-1980s, when Bruno’s Pizza slices were 50 cents and dinosaurs roamed Oxford freely, student journalists burned fingers twice a week applying hot wax to two-inch wide strips of news copy spat out of a phototypesetting machine and trimmed with X-Acto knives. We literally bled for, and often on, our work.

We carefully placed the tacky strips just so on heavy graph paper the size of a proper broadsheet – no tabloid for us, as we looked to the Washington — not New York — Post as a model. Wax wasn’t necessary to add the single-point line rules to create boxes and divide columns since they came pre-sticky, like ridiculously thin Scotch tape.

If reporters missed deadlines – guilty! – the page layout process stretched past midnight. The team felt real pressure. Someone with a car had to deliver the finished layout sheets to a local Oxford print shop, where one lonely guy waited for us. If he gave up on us, well, no paper and plenty of shame.

In those days, you couldn’t just direct people to our website. What’s a website?

The other looming deadline on press nights: closing time for Mac and Joe’s, the paper’s bar. It was here we convened for pitchers of macrobrew to pick off stray line tape from each other’s hair, play The Foundations on the quarter juke and celebrate the stories about to blow the minds of every Miami student come morning.

I was an editor on my high school newspaper and, upon landing at Miami in 1983, figured The Student might be for me. My first assignment was a mess. An editor, a kind senior, sat at the wordprocessing terminal and went over my first story with me line-by-line, patiently explaining the reason for each change. I soaked it in.

Later that first year, I was named assistant editor for the Opinion page, paired with a Reagan-era conservative. The editor-in-chief put us together, he told me, because he wanted ideological balance – a valuable lesson, since I was already a bit too convinced of my own lefty beliefs.

Over the years, I worked as the Sports editor and, later, editor-in-chief. In this last post, I gained a reputation as – how best to say this? – intense. I know this because Kathy Croy and Rob Brookman told me.

Kathy edited “Friday!”, our entertainment section. Rob was our editorial cartoonist. They were my best friends at The Student, so their assessment, while harsh, was likely true.

Perhaps they put up with me because they saw how the Student had become my home. I spent 40 hours a week there, barely treading above water with my classes and grades. The editors, reporters and folks on the business side constituted a tribe – and they let me join.

What a gift.

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My own journalistic contributions, in retrospect, left few minds blown. I labored over an overly-long retrospective of our campus during the Vietnam War and cranked out earnest columns about South Africa divestment and other issues of the day.

Still, my years at The Student taught me how to write, lead a team and meet a deadline. I learned from thoughtful professors, like Hugh Morgan, and upperclassmen like Andy Martin and Mark Curnette. All of it prepped me well for a communications career – in journalism, yes, but also in advocacy and now in higher education.

Sweating to finish the pages on press night and finding a story coming up short in a layout, Kathy and I would resort to hot waxing one of Rob’s sketches in the vacant column-inch. One popular filler: cartoon heads of Rob and me, an inside joke that did nothing to convey the professionalism we claimed to seek.

In the years after, we’d pick up copies and see those two Rob and Burt heads pop up in print, placed by a late night editor who had no idea who we were but facing a deadline with a space to fill. We were glad to be of service.

Burton Glass (‘88) was editor-in-chief of The Miami Student, 1986-87. After graduation, he served as the executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco among other positions, and is now the director of marketing and communications at Boston University’s College of Communication.