Happy 100th birthday to The Trail! Anyone surprised it lasted this long? For a while I thought it was starting to show its age, no two ways about it. Just last week I saw our old newspaper walk into a room, scratch its head and then ask me what it was doing there. “It’s alright, let’s go find your owner,” I remember saying, gently guiding it back to a warm dry shelf. Remember when we all heard it get up five times that one night to use the bathroom? Or when it burped and accidentaly changed the font on every page to Times Old Roman — or when it was driving slowly down Union with its caps lock on? Remember when it changed its masthead from “The Puget Sound Trail” to “Eh? What? Who has a tail?” Great times.
As I was fashioning a small, newspaper-sized coffin out of a plastic recycling bin, it occurred to me that maybe there are, in fact, two ways about it. The Trail might be getting old, but it’s getter better too. For a school without a journalism degree, we collect a pretty talented bunch of aspiring journalists who work together to make one hell of a student newspaper. The Trail turns 100 years young this month and it deserves a celebration! Our paper, which has given this school so much, merits a little recognition.
This semester I would like to welcome all Trail readers to look back at what made this newspaper special and look forward to some exciting new changes. Every week we will be showcasing some of the most titillating, momentous moments from the past century in the “Best of the Trail: 1910-2010” section of the paper. You’ll be able to enjoy articles and advertisements so ancient that if you tried to share them with the big old tree in front of the S.U.B. it would just get confused.
Today marks the first issue of the 100th volume of our school’s student newspaper. As we look back and marvel at how far we’ve come, it’s time to leap ahead once again and try something new. This year The Puget Sound Trail is hiring more writers than ever before and launching a web site that can stand on its very own. It has all the content from the paper, and even some content that isn’t. This is not your grandmother’s blog. Yes, you can comment on articles. Yes, you can “like” your favorite content through Facebook. Yes, you can read the most current Hey You’s every time you refresh a page.
The Trail is jumping into its next hundred years with the internet in one pocket and its rich history in the other. Now, whether you enjoy the smell of ink and paper or prefer the hum of your laptop monitor, there’s truly something for everyone. So go check it out!