College editors may have the best job in the world. They preside over what may be the last of the true general-interest magazines. They get to have all the fun of their counterparts in the commercial world without having to throw sell-lines across their carefully achieved cover art. Usually, they have no advertisers to appease. They can tell stories in long-form narrative or bulleted list – so long as they do it in a font size large enough to please even their oldest reader, and never, ever reverse out type. Expert contributors in every discipline are no further away than a stroll across campus. Their staff may be limited or non-existent but help is immediately at hand if they need a ruling on punctuating rhetorical questions, or a list of 10 ways to become a fossil, or a photograph of a khipu board, or a poem, or an authoritative source on Jamaican street vendors, or a blazon for a coat of arms, or advice on capitalizing French titles, or a mascot to arm-wrestle with the president, or a statesmanlike soundbite from said president, or an apposite Latin tag. Truly, they will never run out of stories to tell but, any day when the well seems suddenly dry, they need do no more than turn to their Class Notes, where they will find someone who has got a job via Twitter; or won a Nobel Prize; or served as event planner to the famous; or written a fistful of Westerns; or discovered a cure for sunburn; or comforted the afflicted; or afflicted the comfortable. They get to use cool words like paginate and folio and full bleed and Trade Gothic. They get to interview people like escaped Sudanese slave Francis Bok and the Dead-Man-Walking nun (Sr. Helen Prejean). They get to figure out how to punctuate “O.Praem.” and when to italicize “communio.” They work right where centuries of tradition – nine centuries, in the case of St. Norbert College – meets the entering first-year class. They conceive and manage content for a community of readers of all ages and many nationalities, in all walks of life and at many stages of life. They get to build community on the page.
